I love how sometimes all the streams seem to be flowing in the same direction.

Yesterday, long-time friend of the decanter Jordana posted some nifty pictures of her children’s Saint-card swap.

In the comments, I remarked that the Eldest Gel and I had just been reading about the life of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Flower of the Mohawks”, for her religion class in school and it was funny that I happened to be reading Francis Parkman’s history of the Jesuit Missionaries in 17th Century Canada at the same time.

Jordana, knowing of and sharing in my enthusiasm for Willa Cather’s Death Comes For The Archbishop then asked me if I had read Shadows on the Rock, another Cather novel which is set in….17th Century Quebec.  In fact, I don’t recall that I had ever heard of it before, but a leetle quick research persuaded me it would be well worth a flutter.

A leetle additional research turned up the coincidental fact that today happens to be the anniversary of the birth of Willa Cather in 1873.

Well, I mean to say!

In honor of all these pleasant little links, I decided to splurge on the Library of America’s hardbacked collection of Cather’s later novels.  Not only does it include Shadows on the Rock, it also includes Death Comes for the Archbishop.  Regular port-swillers will recall my fuming about the near incomprehensibility of the cheap paperback version of Death I bought over the summah, so I am being very clever in killing a couple birds with the same stone here.  (The collection also includes A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, Lucy Gayheart and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, none of which I know anything about.)