and with the cleansing water we sprinkled them in the name of the Holy Trinity, along with three adults whom I had taken with me that they might hear the sacrifice of the mass, and might by word and example be more accurately instructed in the Christian faith.  After we had gone some distance thence, we came to a hamlet in which the natives had built a convenient church in preparation for our arrival, extending over a space of ten cubits.  Here we began to spread our net, or rather the net of Christ, and caught in it all the fish that were there; for all the leading men and women, with old and young, great and small, cast themselves at the feet of Christ Jesus, recognizing Him as the true God and ardently pleading to be joined to Him in faith through the mystery of baptism.  And here I began to recognize the favor which God had shown me, in calling me forth from Espana in these days; for this single instance was enough reason to call me forth.  On the very first occasion when we baptized, we plunged a hundred persons in the sacred fount; on the second, all the rest without exception.

“When I was once explaining to a fierce and barbarous fellow the great glory of paradise and the dire pains of hell, he answered, just as if he had been possessed by a demon, that he had rather go to hell than to paradise; and, as he was one of the chiefs in that region, he carried a great many with him to the same decision of a perverse mind.  But I did not hesitate to attack the foolish fellow again and again, and I insisted upon the horror and the eternity of the torments with great vehemence of language; but he answered that he certainly ought to go, after this life, there, where his parents and the rest of his ancestors had departed, rather than anywhere else.  Then I responded that he had better just try the force of fire; but he, with hands as hard as his heart, did not hesitate to snatch up some burning coals from the hearth.  However, a few days later, his mind divinely changed, he ran out into the fields and meadows, and, calling all his tribesmen together, he urged them to accept the Christian sacraments, with such zeal that he had no equal among the Visaians.”

In another letter sent to the father-visitor from the same place, the same Father Valerio writes that another father had written to him that in the islands Lobo and Dita he had sprinkled four hundred persons, chiefly infants, with the most holy waters.  Thus within the interval of three months more than a thousand had been initiated by the same sacraments, and numberless others are left burning with the same desire.  Therefore the members of our Order declare that the time is come for the salvation of that island, and eagerly wait for workers.