‘The Fathers every morning say Mass for us, and after Mass they go to their rooms, and then they take some hot water and _yerba_ (_maté_), and nothing more; after that he comes to the door of his apartment, and then all those who heard Mass come to kiss his hand, and after that he goes out to see if the Indians are diligent at their tasks, and afterwards they go to their room to read the divine service for the day in his book, and to pray that God may prosper him in all his affairs. At eleven o’clock they go to eat a little, not to eat much, for he only has five dishes, and only drinks wine once, not filling a little glass; and spirits they never drink, and there is no wine in our town, except that which is brought from Candelaria, according to that which the Superior sends, and they bring it from somewhere near Buenos Aires. . . . After he has finished eating, to rest a little he goes into the church; afterwards—yes, he retires to rest a little, and whilst he is resting those who work in the father’s house go out, and those who do any kind of indoor work, and also the sacristan and the cook: all these go out, and as long as the bell does not ring the doors are shut, and only an old man guards the gate, and when they ring the bell again he opens the doors so that those who work indoors may go inside, and the father takes his breviary and goes nowhere. In the evening they ring the bell so that the children may come home, and the father comes in to teach them Christian doctrine.’ Perhaps the foregoing simple description, written by an Indian in Guaraní, and translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the curious inversions of the Guaraní, presents as good a picture of the daily life of a mission priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been given to the public by writers much more ambitious than myself or Ñeenguiru. Nicolas Ñeenguiru, the writer of the letter, afterwards figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several of his letters are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so interesting and simple as that I have transcribed. Dobrizhoffer, in his history of the Abipones, says of him that he was a simple Indian, whom often he had seen put in the stocks for petty faults; at any rate, he seems to have been one of those Indians whom the Jesuits had at least favourably impressed by the system they employed. After the manner in which he wrote, hundreds of Indians must have thought, or else the missions, placed as they were, surrounded on all sides by enemies, could not have endured a single day. What was it, then, which raised the Jesuits up so many and so powerful enemies in Paraguay, when in the districts of the Moxos[217] and the Chiquitos where their power was to the full as great, amongst the Indians, they never had a quarrel with the Spaniards till the day they were expelled? Many and various causes contributed to all they underwent, but most undoubtedly two reasons must have brought about their fall.