[Fol. 69:] In Maragondong various trips were made into the mountains [by Ours], and although many were reclaimed to a Christian mode of living, yet, as the mountains are so difficult of access and so close by, those people returned to their lurking-places very easily, and it was with difficulty that they were again brought into a village--so that the number of Indians was greatly diminished, not only in Maragondong, but in Looc, which was a visita of the former place, and contained very rugged mountains. In order to encourage the Indians thus settled to make raids on the Cimarrons and wild Indians and punish them, Don Juan Cerezo de Salamanca, the governor ad interim, granted that those wild Indians should for a certain time remain the slaves of him who should bring them out of the hills; and by this means they succeeded in bringing out many from their caverns and hiding-places. Some of these were seventy or eighty years old, of whom many died as soon as they were instructed and baptized. Once the raiders came across an old woman about a hundred years old, near the cave in which those people performed their abominable sacrifices; she was alone, flung down on the ground, naked, and of so horrible aspect that she made it evident, even in external appearance, that she was a slave of the devil. Moved by Christian pity, those who were making the raid carried her to the village, where it was with difficulty that the father could catechise her, on account of her age and her stupidity. He finally catechised and baptized her, and she soon died; so that it seems as if it were a mercy of God that she thus waited for baptism, in order that her soul might not be lost--and the same with the other souls, their lives apparently being preserved in order that they might be saved through the agency of baptism. Blessed be His mercy forever! In Ilog, in the island of Negros, several heathens of those mountains were converted to the faith. An Indian woman was there, so obstinate in her blindness and so open in her hatred to holy baptism that, in order to free herself from the importunities of the minister, she feigned to be deaf and mute. Some of her relatives notified the father to come to baptize her. The father went to her, and began to catechise her, but she, keeping up the deceit, pretended that she did not hear him, and he could not draw a word from her. The father cried out to God for the conversion of that soul, and, at the same time, he continued his efforts to catechise her, suspecting that perhaps she was counterfeiting deafness. God heard his prayers, and, after several days, the first word which that woman uttered was a request for baptism--to the surprise of all who knew what horror of it she had felt. The father catechised and baptized her, and this change was recognized as caused by the right hand of the Highest; for she who formerly was like a wild deer, living alone in the thickets, after