Taking with him the three Japanese, Cosme de Torres, a priest, and Jean Fernandes, a brother of the society,—of which, besides several who had joined it in India, some ten or twelve members had followed Xavier from Portugal, and had been distributed in various services,—he sailed in the ship of Chinese merchants, who had agreed with the Portuguese commander at Malacca to carry him to Japan. As Pinto tells the story, this merchant was a corsair, and so notorious a one as to go by the name of the Robber. Xavier says nothing of that, but complains of the levity and vacillation natural to barbarians, which made the captain linger at the islands where he touched, at the risk of losing the monsoon and being obliged to winter in China. Xavier was also greatly shocked at the assiduous worship paid by the mariners to an idol which they had on board, and before which they burnt candles and odoriferous wood, seeking oracles from it as to the result of the voyage. “What were our feelings, and what we suffered, you can well imagine,” he exclaims, “at the thought that this demon should be consulted as to the whole course of our journey.” After touching at Canton the Chinese captain, instead of sailing thence to Japan, as he had promised, followed the coast north toward Chincheo; but hearing, when he approached that port, that it was blockaded by a corsair, he put off in self-defence for Japan, and arrived safe in the port of Kagoshima. Anjirō, or Paul as he was now called, was well received by his relations, and forty days were spent by Xavier in laborious application to the rudiments of the language, and by Paul in translating into Japanese the ten commandments, and other parts of the Christian faith, which Xavier determined, so he writes, to have printed as soon as possible, especially as most of the Japanese could read. Anjirō also devoted himself to exhortations and arguments among his relations and friends, and soon made converts of his wife and daughter, and many besides, of both sexes. An interview was had with the king of Satsuma,—in which province Kagoshima was situated,—and he presently issued an edict allowing his subjects to embrace the new faith. This beginning seemed promising; but Xavier already anticipated a violent opposition so soon as his object came to be fully understood. He drew consolation, however, from the spiritual benefits enjoyed by himself, “since in these remote regions,” so he wrote, “amid the impious worshippers of demons, so very far removed from almost every mortal aid and consolation, we almost of necessity, as it were, forget and lose ourselves in God, which hardly can happen in a Christian land, where the love of parents and country, intimacies, friendship and affinities, and helps at hand both for body and mind, intervene, as it were, between man and God, to the forgetfulness of the latter.” And what tended to confirm this spiritual state of mind was the entire