The overhanging porch and flight of steps that ran down to the grassy sward in the middle of the town gave it an air as of a cathedral reared to nature in the wilds, for the thick jungle flowed up behind it and almost touched its walls. Bells of great size, either cast upon the spot or brought at vast expense from Spain, hung in the towers. On this, the feast day of the Blessed Virgin, the special patron of the settlement, they jangled ceaselessly, the Indians taking turns to haul upon the dried lianas that served instead of ropes. Though they pulled vigorously, the bells sounded a little muffled, as if they strove in vain against the vigorous nature that rendered any work of man puny and insignificant in the Paraguayan wilds. Inside, the fane was dark, the images of saints were dusty, their paint was cracked, their gilding tarnished, making them look a little like the figures in a New Zealand pah, as they loomed through the darkness of the aisle. On the neglected altar, for at that time priests were a rarity in the Reductions, the Indians had placed great bunches of red flowers, and now and then a humming-bird flitted in through the glassless windows and hung poised above them; then darted out again, with a soft, whirring sound. Over the whole capilla, in which at one time several thousand Indians had lived, but now reduced to seventy or eighty at the most, there hung an air of desolation. It seemed as if man, in his long protracted struggle with the forces of the woods, had been defeated, and had accepted his defeat, content to vegetate, forgotten by the world, in the vast sea of green. On this particular day, the annual festival of the Blessed Virgin, there was an air of animation, for from far and near, from Jesuit capilla, from straw-thatched huts lost in the clearings of the primeval forest, from the few cattle ranches that then existed, and from the little town of Itapua, fifty miles away, the scanty population had turned out to attend the festival.