Yet much remained that José could do for his friends. His familiarity with the white man’s language, learning, and habits, enabled him to perform many important services for them. But best of all was his power to comfort them with strange sweet words spoken in the tongue of their fathers, and linked in a thousand ways to all their cherished thoughts and traditions, yet strong with a strength and wise with a wisdom that was not theirs. Earnestly did he labour to inspire the hearts of his brethren with his own passionate love and reverence for the King, the great Inca of the East, upon whom all his hopes were resting. To return to that particular evening, just one year after the death of Melchior del Salto. José came in, hot and tired, from a walk to Lima, undertaken as escort and guide to a Dominican friar, newly arrived from the West Indies. The monk had spent the preceding day and night with Fray Fernando, being ill from the effects of a long and uncomfortable voyage. He was not too ill, however, for much conversation, or rather controversy, with his kind-hearted host. “Well, José, did you deliver up your charge in safety?” Fray Fernando asked with a smile. José’s face wore a rather curious expression as he answered, “I did. Two years ago, patre, I should have been pleased to see a Spaniard treat his own countrymen as Spaniards everywhere treat Indians.” “I had hoped, José,” said Fray Fernando a little sadly, “that those old thoughts of bitterness were of the past.” “The old bitterness, yes; the old thoughts—_never_!” José was silent a moment, then resumed in a different tone. “This good friar seems to imagine that we of Rimac are all fast asleep, and that he has come to wake us. He thinks we are poor, silly, ignorant folk, understanding nothing; just as the Spaniards think of my people. All the time it is _they_ who cannot understand. How can they, when they despise us? We know secrets that are sealed from them for ever.” “Did you follow our long argument to-day, José?” Fray Fernando asked somewhat anxiously. “I followed you,” said José, “and I went before you, and all round you, and away from you, and back again to you, twenty times, at least, while you were talking.” “Ah, José! I shall never get the slightest idea of logic into your head. How could you possibly think out a chain of reasoning after that fashion?” “I do not think my thoughts, patre, in chains, with one link holding on to another. My thoughts grow up like flowers—here, there, anywhere they list.” “Then read this, and tell me what thoughts ‘grow up’ in your mind about it.” And Fray Fernando handed him a letter, a fair, well-written document, with a mitre on its seal. It was in Latin, but that was now no impediment to José.