The Clerigo found his remonstrances and appeals to his own nominally Christian fellow-countrymen wholly ineffectual in restraining or even mitigating the oppressions and cruelties inflicted upon the wretched natives. There was something phenomenal, as has been said, in the license yielded to the ingenuity of Spanish barbarity. It combined all the devices of inquisitorial torturing with the indulgence of the bestial ferocities of the bullfight. At times it seemed as if the heartless oppressors were seeking only for a brutal mirth in inventing games in which their victims should writhe and yell as for their amusement. Then, as opportunity suggested or served, a scheme of the most cunning treachery and malice would turn an occasion of revelry or feasting, to which the natives had been invited or been beguiled by their tormentors, into a riot of fury and massacre. The utter aimlessness and recklessness of most of these horrid enormities impress the reader in these days as simply the indulgence of a wanton spirit in giving free license in human passions to those mocking employments of grinning devils in the old church paintings as they inflict retributions on the damned spirits in hell. The forked weapons, the raging flames, and the hideous demoniac delights exhibited in paintings, with which the eyes of the Spaniards were so familiar, found their all-too-faithful counterparts in the tropical zones and valleys of our virgin islands. The only pretences offered, not for justifying but for inflicting such wanton barbarities on the natives, were such as these,—that they refused to make known or to guide their oppressors to rich mines, or to work beyond their powers of endurance, or to bear intolerable burdens, or to furnish food which they had not to give. Touching and harrowing it is to read of many instances in which the simple diplomacy of the natives prompted them to neglect the little labor of husbandry required to supply their own wants, in order that the invaders might with themselves be brought to starvation. Whenever the Clerigo accompanied a body of Spaniards on the way to an Indian village, he always made an effort to keep the two people apart by night and by day, and he employed himself busily in baptizing infants and little children. He could never be too quick in this service, as these subjects of his zeal were the victims of the indiscriminate slaughter. The only consolation which this tender-hearted yet heroic missionary could find, as his share in the enterprise of his people, was in keeping the reckoning on his tablets of the number of those born under the common heathen doom whom he had snatched, by a holy drop, from the jaws of hell.