rude and barbarous, he declared that the hand of God could be seen in this work. The Lord took to himself the tithe of the first ten baptized children; but the Indians who in their heathen days had been accustomed to spend a week in weeping and mourning their dead children, with a thousand superstitions and extravagances, before burying them, now accepted readily from the hand of the Lord the death of baptized children who departed in their innocence; and, without a sign of grief, they themselves took the little bodies of their children to be buried in the church. In the case of adults also, some of them showed marvelous devotion and were baptized on their deathbeds. Even those who were not baptized believed, and helped the baptized to die blessedly. Many signs of true conversion were shown by these Indians; the Virgin showed special grace to some of the converts, in particular assisting one poor woman of small intelligence to learn the prayers, with which she had great difficulty; and miracles were wrought in order that those predestined by God might not die unbaptized. By the twelfth of January of the following year more than five hundred of this tribe had been baptized; and though it would seem that such a number would have justified the permanent residence of a minister among them, father Fray Luis was obliged to leave the Mandayas, to go to aid in hearing the confessions of those in the lower villages, where there were only six confessors for more than eight thousand penitents. He departed from them with grief, and left behind for their instruction some Indians qualified for the purpose, among them the master-of-camp Don Francisco Tuliao (who was an Indian). He had accompanied the religious in their good work, being also directed by the civil authorities to lead in a war for the reduction of some Indians near the Mandayas, in villages called Ysson.] They had risen; and, being favored by their location in the midst of rugged mountains, had refused the obedience and the tributes which they had been accustomed to pay to their encomenderos. This difficulty was happily settled by Don Francisco, as a result of his prudence and authority. The truth is that the thing was already practically settled, father Fray Geronimo de Zamora having arranged it when he came up for the first time to the Mandayas. At this time he summoned the chiefs of the villages of Ysson along with the rest; and the arguments of this father had such an influence upon them that they immediately yielded to them and put themselves in his hands. As a token of their fidelity they cut off their hair, which is much cherished by these heathen; and this was as much as to say that they renounced their ancient customs and the laws of their ancestors, and that they desired to embrace the law of God, whose servants did not wear their hair long, as did all the heathen. Would that there had been ministers and preachers to give them; for they would have been able to enter this