Thus in the greater world reformers of all sorts have not infrequently in times of scarcity and danger been taken by their protégés for the authors of their trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government which caused the ruin, well bolstered up in the affection of its ‘taxables’, chuckled, serenely confident in the unending folly of mankind. Most certainly the Jesuits struggled to do their duty to their neophytes in what they thought they saw was right. On foot and unattended Fathers Maceta and Mansilla followed the fifteen thousand captives to Brazil, confessing those who fell upon the road before they died, and instant in supplication to the Paulistas for the prisoners’ release. Father Maceta especially behaved heroically, carrying the chains of those who could hardly drag themselves along, himself half dead with hunger and his constant toil. Especially he strove to effect the release of a captive chief called Guiravera, who had been one of his bitterest enemies, and strove so hard that a Paulista captain, either touched by his zeal or wearied with his pleading, released the chief, his wife and family, and six of the Indians of his tribe. The chief returned to become the Jesuits’ best friend, and the two priests on foot followed the captives’ train. What they endured on foot without provisions, tortured by insects, and in danger from wild beasts, as well as constant perils from the Paulistas, who now and then pricked them with lances or fired pistols over their heads to frighten them away, none but those who have journeyed in the forests of that forgotten corner of the world can estimate. I see them in their torn and sun-browned cassocks struggling through the _esteros_[68] in water to the knees, falling and rising oft, after the fashion of the supposititious Christian on life’s way; pushing along through forest paths across which darted humming-birds, now coming on a dying man and kneeling by his side, now gathering the berries of the guavirami[69] to eat upon the road, and then again catching sight of a jaguar as it slunk beside the trail, and all the time convinced that all their efforts, like the efforts of most of those who strive, would be in vain. So stumbling through the woods, crossing the rivers on inflated ox-skins, baked by the sun upon the open plains, at length the Jesuits reached San Paulo, where they had a college, and without resting set at once to work. In season (and what in cases of the kind is ten times more important), out of season, they besought, pleaded, and preached, and finding as little grace from the Paulista chiefs as a transgressor against some fiery dogma would find from a sour-faced North British dogmatist, they started for Rio de Janeiro to see the Council-General of Brazil. There they were told that the right person to address was the Captain-General of the colony, who had his residence in Bahia, five or six hundred miles away. Not the least daunted, they set out, and found Don Diego