freedom in Japan “from those delights which elsewhere stimulate the flesh and break down the strength of mind and body. The Japanese,” he wrote, “rear no animals for food. Sometimes they eat fish;—they have a moderate supply of rice and wheat; but they live, for the most part, on vegetables and fruits; and yet they attain to such a good old age, as clearly to show how little nature, elsewhere so insatiable, really demands.” Anjirō himself wrote at the same time a short letter to the brethren at Goa, but it adds nothing to the information contained in Xavier’s. The following account, which Cosme de Torres,[24] a Spaniard by birth, Xavier’s principal assistant, and his successor at the head of the mission, gives of himself in a letter written from Goa to the society in Europe, just before setting out, shows, like other cases to be mentioned hereafter, that it was by no means merely from the class of students that the order of the Jesuits was at its commencement recruited. Though always inclined, so Cosme writes, to religion, yet many things and various desires for a long time distracted him. In the year 1538, in search he knew not of what, he sailed from Spain to the Canaries, whence he visited the West Indies and the continent of New Spain, where he passed four years in the greatest abundance, and satiety even, of this world’s goods. But desiring something greater and more solid, in 1542 he embarked on board a fleet of six ships, fitted out by Mendosa, the viceroy of New Spain, to explore and occupy the islands of the Pacific, discovered by Magellan in 1521. Standing westward, on the fifty-fifth day they fell in, so Cosme writes, with a numerous cluster of very small, low islands, of which the inhabitants lived on fish and the leaves of trees. Ten days after they saw a beautiful island, covered with palms, but the wind prevented their landing. In another ten or twelve days the ships reached the great island of Mindanao, two hundred leagues in circumference, but with few inhabitants. Sailing thence to the south they discovered a small island abounding in meat and rice; but having, during half a year’s residence, lost four hundred men in contests with the natives, who used poisoned arrows, they sailed to the Moluccas, where they remained about two years, till it was finally resolved, not having the means to get back to New Spain, to apply to the Portuguese governor to forward them to Goa. At Amboina, Cosme met with Xavier, whose conversation revived his religious inclinations; and, proceeding to Goa, he was ordained a priest by the bishop there, who placed him in charge of a cure. But he found no peace of mind till he betook himself to the college of St. Paul (which seems by this time to have passed into the hands of the Jesuits), being the more confirmed in his resolution to join the order, by the return of Xavier to Goa, whose invitation to accompany him to Japan he joyfully accepted, and where he continued for twenty years to labor as a