But for the Indian youth, at least, he had not laboured in vain. Long ago José had displaced the clumsy Pepe as acolyte, to the great satisfaction of every one, Pepe himself alone excepted. He knew the “Doctrina de la Fé” as well as any intelligent Spanish lad of his age. He was diligent in the repetition of prayers, and the performance of every other religious duty enjoined on him. He had learned to read and write, and Fray Fernando was beginning to teach him Latin—a necessary labour, if the accomplishment of reading was to be of any use to him, as the few books his patron possessed were in that language. José learned quickly, for his memory was remarkably good, and the similarity between Latin and Spanish, which contrasted delightfully with the utter and perplexing difference between Spanish and Quichua, made the task a comparatively light one. His instructor’s pleasure in his progress might have been somewhat lessened had he dreamed that his pupil imagined all the time that he was learning the language of the Jews. Was he not to read the Psalms of David in the Latin tongue, and was not David a king of the Jews? José believed that the Jews were a great but very wicked people, who lived, or had lived long ago (for his notions of chronology were vague in the extreme), on the other side of the Mother Sea. They were guilty, he knew, of the awful crime of having put to death the Son of God, and he thought that in righteous judgment the Spaniards, with the Pope at their head, made war upon them, and had driven them out of their country. He supposed the Pope to be a Spaniard, and the Catholic High Priest. He had a hazy idea that he never died, but lived on miraculously from age to age. He knew that various nations of white men, who were not Spaniards, lived beyond the great sea; and imagined they bore the same relation to the Spaniards, in power and civilization, as the barbarous tribes subdued by his Inca forefathers did to them. Perhaps Fray Fernando would not have dispelled this illusion, even if he could.