When all the Mocobios and most of the Tobas were departed, Keebetavalkin, the Cacique of the latter, remained some months with us, till he died of the small-pox, after having received baptism from me; a circumstance which stirred up the Toba nation against us, and was the occasion of my receiving a bloody wound. I shall give the particulars of the whole affair. Our Abipones had caught the small-pox in Fulgentio's estate, and on their return to the colony infected all the other inhabitants, excepting only those who had already undergone that disease: and it may be looked upon as a great blessing that a disorder, generally fatal to the Americans, proved so in this case to only twenty out of nearly three hundred who took the infection, though it raged from the 14th of May, till November. What trouble it occasioned me, who was obliged to perform the double part of physician and priest, exceeds belief. Nearly all my Abipones were still in a state of barbarism—either alien to the rites of the church, or impious deserters and despisers of them. Hence day and night I was filled with anxiety, that if the medicines I administered failed to prevent death, I might at least, by sacred rites, endow the souls of my patients with a blessed immortality; a matter of infinite art and difficulty. For, alarmed at the death of an old woman, the first that fell victim to the disease, all but a very few fled from the colony, vainly endeavouring to preserve their lives in remote recesses. Some crossed the Rio Grande, travelled to a distance of twenty leagues, and left to themselves, destitute of all aid and medicine, every one recovered. I was thus separated from most part of the colonists, being ignorant of their place of concealment, and consequently unable to approach them without guides, which were not to be procured. Some were only four leagues distance from the colony; the followers of Oahari only one; and these two hordes I was daily obliged to visit, with extreme difficulty, on account of the rivers and marshes that were to be crossed, and imminent danger from wild beasts, and wandering savages. To provide both for the minds and bodies of these wretches, I had to administer their food and medicine with my own hands, and to explain to them the heads of religion, that they might be in a fit state for baptism, to receive which, it was only with the utmost difficulty that they could be persuaded, entertaining a notion, common to all savages, of its causing death. To recall apostates to repentance who had repudiated their legitimate wives, and abjured religion, was a still more arduous business. Yet to show you how powerfully the compassion of God was exerted on this occasion, none of them departed this life without receiving baptism, except one woman, who, when first attacked by the disorder, resisted my exhortations that she would undergo that ceremony, denying that she was in any immediate danger.