Although it is scarcely three weeks since my arrival from the visit which Father Pastells and I made to the villages of the southern part of this mission, I received your Reverence's both affectionate and short letter of December 30 of last year, together with the authorizations which you were pleased to send me under separate covers. Ex intimo corde [92] I acknowledge to your Reverence both letter and authorizations, and give you a thousand thanks for them. And now desiring to pay so pleasing a favor with something more [than thanks], I am going to write you a minute relation of the last two excursions that we two fathers made together, for I know the great consolation that your Reverence receives by the reading of such relations, for besides the fact that you learn from them of the condition and progress of your dear missions and of the fathers and brothers who work in them, whom your Reverence loves with the true love of a father, there is also seen in the same relations the not small fruit that is obtained in souls by the mercy of God. Almost never is there lacking the relation of some remarkable event or edifying deed in the conquest of the heathens to our holy faith, which recreates the spirit and invites one to praise the goodness of our sweet Jesus. Some events of such a nature have occurred during the last two excursions which I have carefully noted in order to relate them to your Reverence. We made our first excursion in December of last year, after the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the most holy Virgin to the visita of Santa Fe, which is distant two hours' journey from this capital, and which is located at the end of the small bay which is the terminal of Points Alisud de Caraga, and Sancol de Manurigao. About five hundred and sixty-nine Christians who have been reduced from the beliefs of the Mandayas in the space of the eight years since it was founded by our fathers, form its population. This village is one of the three which have been for a considerable time the aim of the repeated attacks of the Baganís or assassins of the mountains of Bungádon and Manlubúan. During the same days that we stayed there, the murder of three Mandayas, sácopes of Captain Ciriaco Lanquibo, who was recently converted to Christianity, happened in the fields which are located between that village and that of Manurígao. A week after we had returned to Caraga, we were informed that another like murder had been committed on another unfortunate friendly Mandaya near the said village of San Luis. So bold do those barbarians show themselves, because there is no force with which to pursue them, and they feel so secure in the places where they reside!