"Me, did this great king examine with more curious eyes than he bestowed upon the other captives. I know not for what reason, unless because of the superior size and strength which I possess, and the extreme length and thickness of my beard and hair, of which, as a Christian man, I have always made too much account. All of us did he assign to labor; to the gathering of wood, and work in the maize fields, with the women. By-and-by, there came a preference for me beyond the others. I was brought into the king's household, and barbed his arrows, and wrought upon his great macanas, and strove, among the Indians, in hewing out his canoes from the cypress, first burning out the greater core with fire. But when harvest time came, a great festivity was held among the savages. Bitter roots were gathered in the woods, and great vessels of the beverage which was made thereof, was placed within the council or round-house of the nation. Thither did the chiefs resort and drink; and ever as they drank they danced, though the liquor wrought upon them like _aguardiente_ with the European, and moved them even as the most violent of emetic medicines. Still danced they, and still they danced for the space of three whole days.--But the lord of Calos seemed not to mingle at this strange festival. He purposed rites still more strange--rites, which even now, I think upon with horror only. He had a dwelling to himself in the deep woods, whither he retired the night before the day when the great feast of the nation was to begin. Here he waited all the night, watching with reverence and patience the burning of a strange fire which had been wrought of many curious and fragrant herbs and roots. Three of the ancient people, the priests or Iawas, as they style themselves, retired with him to build this fire, which, when it began to burn, placing in store a sufficient supply of aromatic fuel that he might feed it still, they left him, with strange exorcising, to himself. And there he kept watch throughout the night. But early with the next morning he came forth, and he sprinkled the ashes of the fire upon the maize field, and he cried thrice, with a loud voice, of Yo-he-wah, which, I believe to mean the sacred name as known among the red-men. With each cry, as our poor Spaniards, myself among them, were gathering the green ears from the maize stalks, the priests who followed the king of Calos, seized bodily upon three of our brethren, taking us by surprise, and putting us all in a quaking fear. These three were all brought before the lord of Calos, who, not looking upon them as they lay bound at his feet, threw yet another vessel of sacred ashes into the air, and as these three Spaniards lay separate, with their faces looking up, I beheld the ashes sink immediately upon the breast of him whom I have already named to you--the Jonas by whom our vessel was doomed to wreck--the cruel Don Juan de Mores y Silva. Now, though the king surely