live or die at Gabon. So they remained in this other little village, though they went daily to Gabon and the other villages near there, to render aid in the necessities of the Indians, and especially to visit the sick. On one of these visits father Fray Luis Gandullo and Father Marcos de San Antonio saw a man who was very sick. When they urged him to be baptized, he responded with abuse and insult. The fathers asked the people in the house with what illness he was afflicted, and they said that he was troubled with a very great swelling, and would not let them treat it. The fathers then examined him carefully, and found a dreadful abscess extending from the thigh across the abdomen; they opened it by force, and let out a great quantity of matter. Those in the house, when they saw this rotten and offensive matter, fled away from the religious, while the man himself abused them. They answered him humbly, telling him that they had given him his life. "Even though I should die," he said, "never come back again." The man recovered, and in course of time was converted. This and other works of charity, and in especial the cure of a woman afflicted with a disgusting leprosy, who had been abandoned by her relatives, won for the fathers the love of these Indians. At last even the chief of those who had planned to kill the religious gave his child to be baptized, and finally offered himself for baptism. Baptisms in the church were begun in the month of October, 1588. When the perversity of this region was overcome, many other churches were built in the neighboring villages, the mildness of the sheep sent forth by the Lord prevailing, as it always has prevailed, against the bloodthirsty wolves of heathendom. About the same time the new provincial--if he can be called new who had already held the position of provincial twice before--undertook a visitation of his new province. This was the second year since he had come, and the province had greatly increased; while at the same time his sons and brothers were suffering great hardships, in living among a race without God or law or justice. To participate in their discomforts, and to aid them in their difficulties, he set out to visit them. At Bataan he found all things in as good order as if the new converts had sucked in Christianity with their mothers' milk. The Lord began to show these Indians great mercy, both spiritual and temporal. He gave them a succession of fertile years, which, being farmers, they estimate more highly than anything else. They also saw the land visited by a great plague of locusts, which attacked the fields of the heathen but left those of the Christians untouched. From this time on there were also fewer sicknesses and deaths than when they were heathens. To this improvement in health the diligence of the missionaries contributed, who ordered houses to be built in all the villages to serve as hospitals. Here they caused the sick poor to be