This is the sole occasion on which Padre Ruiz Montoya even remotely touches the field of miracles, as he in general relies upon himself, his knowledge of the world, and on his patience, which must have been almost North British in its quality, if he acted up to his own favourite maxim of ‘by returning thanks for injuries is how wise men conduct their business.’[78] In 1623 we find him praying Father Cataldino to let him accompany the expedition to Itiranbaru, a mountain wooded to the summit, in which lived several wild tribes. There he so worked upon the Indians as to establish them in a reduction under the title of St. Francis Xavier,[79] and left the mountain, which had been a haunt of savages, as Padre del Techo says in his curious work on Paraguay, ‘all at the service of the Lord.’ In 1623, whilst preaching, he was suddenly assailed by hostile Indians, and seven of his Indians pierced with arrows at his feet. Undoubtedly, he must have been killed had not an Indian taken his hat and cloak, and run into the middle of the enemy to distract the fire. In the confusion both the heroic Indian and Montoya managed to escape, the latter getting into a canoe which, fortunately, was ready at the river-side. But in the midst of all his occupations he had time to study natural history in the spirit of the time, as the following description clearly shows: ‘Amongst the other rarities of the land is an amphibious animal. . . . It is like a sheep, with but the difference that its teeth and nails are like a tiger’s, which animal it equals in ferocity. The Indians never look on it without terror, and when it sallies from the marshes where it lives (which it does ordinarily in troops), they have no other chance of escape but to climb up a tree, and even then sometimes are not in safety, for this terrible creature sometimes uproots the tree, or sometimes stays on guard until the Indian falls into its jaws.’ Thus far Montoya; but Charlevoix informs us that, _en langue Guaranie_, it is known as the ‘ao’, and rather tamely adds, ‘When one of these animals is slain, the people make a jacket of its skin.’ Again, Montoya tells us of the horse on which the venerable Padre Roque used to ride, which, when he died, refused all food, and wept perpetually, two streams of water running from its eyes. It never allowed an Indian to mount it after its master’s death, and finally expired, close to his grave, of grief. A kindly, scholarly, intrepid priest, well skilled in knowledge of the world, and not without some tincture of studies in science, as the above-related anecdotes reveal to us. No doubt the Indians loved him far and wide, and his superiors stood in some little awe of him, as those in office often do of their subordinates when they show that capacity for action which is a sure bar to advancement either in Church or State.