forbear asking him some questions about those lamentations, which we
heard upon our entering into that place. He confessed with the utmost
frankness and ingenuity that the priests and religious have given
dreadful accounts both of us and of the religion we preached; that the
unhappy people were taught by them that the curse of God attended us
wheresoever we went; that we were always followed by the grasshoppers,
that pest of Abyssinia, which carried famine and destruction over all the
country; that he, seeing no grasshoppers following us when we passed by
their village, began to doubt of the reality of what the priests had so
confidently asserted, and was now convinced that the representation they
made of us was calumny and imposture. This discourse gave us double
pleasure, both as it proved that God had confuted the accusations of our
enemies, and defended us against their malice without any efforts of our
own, and that the people who had shunned us with the strongest
detestation were yet lovers of truth, and came to us on their own accord.
Nothing could be more grossly absurd than the reproaches which the
Abyssinian ecclesiastics aspersed us and our religion with. They had
taken advantage of the calamity that happened the year of our arrival:
and the Abyssins, with all their wit, did not consider that they had
often been distressed by the grasshoppers before there came any Jesuits
into the country, and indeed before there were any in the world.

Whilst I was in these mountains, I went on Sundays and saints' days
sometimes to one church and sometimes to another. One day I went out
with a resolution not to go to a certain church, where I imagined there
was no occasion for me, but before I had gone far, I found myself pressed
by a secret impulse to return back to that same church. I obeyed the
influence, and discovered it to proceed from the mercy of God to three
young children who were destitute of all succour, and at the point of
death. I found two very quickly in this miserable state; the mother had
retired to some distance that she might not see them die, and when she
saw me stop, came and told me that they had been obliged by want to leave
the town they lived in, and were at length reduced to this dismal
condition, that she had been baptised, but that the children had not.
After I had baptised and relieved them, I continued my walk, reflecting
with wonder on the mercy of God, and about evening discovered anothe