superintend every different department, and to see that all was going on well in shops and in fields. They had, however, their days and hours of relaxation. They were taught singing, music, and dancing, under certain regulations. On holidays, the men played at various games, shot at marks, played with balls of elastic gum, or went out hunting and fishing. Every kind of art that was innocent or ornamental was practised. They cast bells, and carved and gilded with great elegance. The women, beside their other domestic duties, made pottery, and spun and wove cotton for garments. The Jesuits exported large quantities of the Caa, or Paraguay tea, and introduced valuable improvements in the mode of its preparation. Such were some of the regulations which the Jesuits had established in these settlements; and notwithstanding the regular system of employment kept up, the natives flocked into them in such numbers, that it required all the ingenuity of the fathers to accommodate them all. The largest of their Reductions contained as many as eight thousand inhabitants; the smallest fifteen hundred; the average was about three thousand. To preserve that purity of morals which was inculcated, it was found necessary to obtain a royal mandate, that no Spaniard should enter these Reductions except when going to the bishop or superior. “And one thing,” says Charlevoix, “greatly to their honour, was universally allowed by all the Europeans settled in South America: the converted Indians inhabiting them, no longer exhibited traces of their former proneness to vengeance, cruelty, and the grosser vices. They were no longer, in any respect, the same men they formerly were. The most cordial love and affection for each other, and charity for all men, delighted all who visited them, the infidels especially, whom their behaviour served to inspire with the most favourable opinion of the Christian religion.” “It is,” he adds, “no ways surprising that God should work such wonders in such pure souls; nor that those very Indians, to whom some learned doctors would not allow reason enough to be received into the bosom of the church, should be at this day one of its greatest ornaments, and perhaps the most precious portion of the flock of Christ.”