The populace of Yamaguchi, ridiculing Xavier’s mean appearance as contrasted with his pretensions, drove him out of the city with curses and stones. Winter had now set in, and the cold was severe. The coast was infested by pirates, and the interior by robbers, which obliged the saint to travel as servant to some merchants, who, themselves on horseback, required him, though on foot, and loaded with a heavy box of theirs, to keep up with them at full gallop. This, however, seems a little exaggerated, as Japanese travellers on horseback never exceed a walk; while the box which Xavier carried is represented by the earlier writers as containing the sacred vessels for the sacrifice of the mass. Arriving thus at Miyako in rather sad plight, Xavier found that capital almost ruined by civil wars, and on the eve of becoming the field of a new battle. He could obtain no audience, as he had hoped, either of the Kubō-Sama or of the Shaku, nor any hearing except from the populace, so that he judged it best to return again to Hirado. There are two means of working upon the imagination, both of which are employed by turns alike by the Romish and by the Buddhist clergy. One is by showing a contempt not merely for elegances, but even for common comforts and ordinary decencies: the other, by pomp, show, and display. Xavier, on his way to Miyako, entered the city of Yamaguchi barefoot and meanly clad, and had, as we have stated, been hooted and stoned by the populace. He now returned thither again from Hirado handsomely clothed, and taking with him certain presents and recommendatory letters from the Portuguese viceroy of the Indies and the governor of Malacca, addressed to the Japanese princes, but of which as yet he had made no use. Demanding an audience of the king, he was received with respect, and soon obtained leave to preach, and an unoccupied house of the bonzes to live in. Here, being soon surrounded by crowds, he renewed, say his biographers, the miracle of tongues, not only in preaching fluently in Japanese and in Chinese to the numerous merchants of that nation who traded there, but in being able by a single answer to satisfy a multitude of confused questions which the eager crowd simultaneously put to him. Such was his success that, in less than two months, five hundred persons, most of them of consideration, received baptism; and, though the king soon began to grow less favorable, the converts increased, during less than a year that he remained there, to three thousand. The seed thus planted, Xavier resolved to return to the Indies for a fresh supply of laborers; and, having heard of the arrival of a Portuguese vessel at Fuchū, in the kingdom of Bungo, leaving De Torres and Fernandez at Yamaguchi, he proceeded to Fuchū for the purpose of embarking.