Though unsuccessful in his search that year, Dobrizhoffer, not daunted by his barefoot marching, set out again upon the Gospel trail next spring. After another journey of some twenty days, during the whole course of which it rained incessantly, he came on a community of seemingly quite happy sylvans, whom he proceeded to convert. In the first hut he met with there were eight doors, and in it dwelt some sixty Indians—a palm-built, grass-thatched phalanstery, with hammocks slung from the rude beams, in which ‘these heathen’ used to sleep. Each separate family had its own fire, on the hearth of which stood mugs and gourds and pots of rudely-fashioned earthenware. Naked and not ashamed ‘these savages’, and the men wore upon their heads high crowns of parrot feathers. For arms they carried bows and arrows, and the first man Dobrizhoffer saw was holding a dead pheasant in one hand, and in the other a short bow. In the woods around the phalanstery was an ‘amazing’ quantity of maize, of fruits of divers sorts, and of tobacco. From the hives which the wild bees make in hollow trees, they collected honey in large quantities, which served them (at least so Dobrizhoffer says) for meat and drink alike. Their name for the god they worshipped was Tupá, but ‘of that God and his commandments they care to know but little.’ This sounds ambiguous, and would appear at first sight as if the confidence betwixt the creators and their God had been but slight. Perhaps the ambiguity may be set down to the translator[247] who turned the Latin in which the memoirs first were formed into the vulgar tongue. A thing remarkable enough when one considers how prone mankind is to act differently was that, although the Itatines knew an evil spirit under the name of Aná, yet they paid little adoration to him, apparently content to know as little of him and his laws as they did of their God. Those hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and wrong, and all the other things which by all rights they should have known, as they are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter what his state, seem to have lived quite happily in their involuntary sin.[248] But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he thought was right, wept bitter tears when he thought upon their unregenerate state.