There was another silence. Then José said thoughtfully, “When I was a little child I used to think that the Children of the Sun reigned yet at Cuzco, and that as soon as I was a man I should go thither, and see the Inca in his golden chair, and the palaces and temples, and hear the happy songs, and join in the dances at the great feasts. But now I know that the Spaniards have swept everything away, like the great earth-overturning flood.[14] Still, for all that, one day _the Inca will reign again_.” This was said with no outburst of childish feeling, but with a quiet slow gravity, born of intense conviction. That belief was the thing that lay deepest in the young child’s heart. “How know you that?” asked Fray Fernando, a little surprised. “Yachani—I know,” was all José would say in reply. It was not one solitary childish voice alone that whispered, “The Inca will reign again.” For long years and years was that fair hope cherished, and held close to the heart of an oppressed people, to keep it from breaking in its helpless misery. The herdsman who tended the llamas on the hills of his fathers for the food of the cruel stranger, the slave who wove their fleeces into beautiful fabrics for his clothing, or dug gold and silver out of the earth to minister to his luxuries, alike consoled themselves under toil and starvation, under stripes and torture, with that sweet whisper of hope, “The Inca will reign again.” The Indian mother who sang to her babe, in cradle-songs sadder than requiems,— “Seeking through the whole world I should not meet my equal in misery; Accursed be the night I was born;”[15] yet taught him, as he grew, to look up to that faint star of promise, the only one that beamed on their darkness,—“The Inca will reign again.” Nor even, when the long slow years had “rolled into the centuries,” was the light of that star extinguished. Still the hearts of the people yearned “with quenchless love profound” after their beneficent Incas,—after the kings who were the friends of the poor. It is not yet one hundred years since men—and women—died cheerfully, in heroic despair, with the word on their lips, “We have no king but our Inca.” Very beautiful is this tenacity of love, of faith, of hope for the future, born of the memories of the past. Are not such instincts true prophecies, though in a different sense from any of which the poor untaught Indians could dream? VI. Viracocha Visits His Brethren. “But what hast thou lacked with me, that, behold, thou seekest to go to thine own country And he answered, Nothing: howbeit let me go in any wise.” 1 KINGS xi. 22.