My strength being somewhat repaired, it was thought advisable for me to pursue my journey to the Guarany towns, where I might be entirely restored to health. Antonio Miranda, rector of the college, a man of plain manners, and a hater of flattery, said to me, just as I was going to mount my horse; "You have had more to endure in two years, in the situation you have just quitted, than others go through during many years in other colonies." The rector also desired me to defer my journey for a while, and to act instead of the Jesuit priest, who was absent on business, in the estate of our college, called Paraguay, and twenty leagues distant from Asumpcion. This place stretches out on one side into a pleasant plain, affording pasture to a vast quantity of cattle; on the other, where it looks towards the south, it is surrounded by hills and rocks; in one of which a cross piled up of three large stones is visited, and held in great veneration by the natives for the sake of St. Thomas; for they believe, and firmly maintain, that the Apostle, seated on these stones as on a chair, formerly preached to the assembled Indians. Having executed my commission here, I pursued my journey on horseback, accompanied by a few Negroes; for the shores of the Tebiguary, which we crossed in a boat, are thought extremely dangerous for travellers. On Christmas-eve, I reached the towns of the Guaranies, and after travelling so many hundred leagues by water and land, laboured sedulously, the first days of my arrival, both in the pulpit, and the confessional chair. The tranquillity of those places, proper diet, and the prescriptions of Norbert Ziulak, a famous physician and apothecary, within a few weeks restored me so completely to health, that seeing myself capable of undertaking another journey of an hundred and forty leagues, I returned in Lent to the town of St. Joachim, at the earnest request of its magistrate, and with the permission of the Corregidor of the Indian towns. Amongst the Ytatinguas, the inhabitants of this town, with whom I had formerly lived six years, I now spent two more with much satisfaction. Here, indeed, my labours were great, but they were pleasant, being crowned with abundant success; I would that they had been lasting! But in two years I was recalled from this town, and sent back to Europe with my associates, by order of the king. The banishment of the shepherds was the destruction of the poor little sheep; and the Abipones, leaving their towns, began anew to cut the throats of the Spaniards. A Jesuit who sailed to Europe a year later than the rest, told me, at Vienna, that all the Abipones had deserted the town of St. Joachim, where I had left two thousand and seventeen Christians on my departure, and that the neighbouring town of St. Stanislaus, which had formerly contained two thousand three hundred neophytes, was entirely destitute of inhabitants. Some secular priests, as well as monks, were