already alienated
by the excesses of the Spaniards, would neither attend mass nor be
catechized, except upon compulsion. It was the policy of Guarionex to
offer no resistance to the addresses of the priests. But an outrage
committed upon his wife hindered the progress of religion in his
province. He dashed the cross to the ground in fury, and scattered the
utensils. The affrighted priests fled, leaving behind a chapel with some
pictures which they had instructed the converts to regard in offering up
their prayers. Guarionex buried all the pictures, and said over them,
instead of a Pater, "Now you will begin to bear fruit!" Friar Roman says
that a catechumen, digging his _agis_ (sweet pepper) in that field,
found two or three of them grown together in the shape of a cross. The
miracle and the outrage were reported at once, and the six natives who
had buried the pictures at the command of Guarionex were burnt alive!
This was the first _auto-da-fe_ on Haytian soil.

The preaching and the lust went on. But the preaching sometimes
addressed the sinner also. Montesino, a Dominican preacher, attacked the
cruelty of the colonists from the pulpit of San Domingo. He was accused
of treason; that is to say, the king was held to represent the policy
which enslaved and destroyed the Indian. The authorities threatened to
expel the Dominicans from the island, if the preacher did not apologize
and withdraw his charges. Montesino promised soon to preach in another
style. Having filled the church with his malignant audience, he bravely
maintained his position with fresh facts and arguments; he showed that
the system of _repartimientos,_ or partition of the Indians among the
colonists, was more disastrous than the first system, which imposed upon
each cacique a tax and left him to extort it from his subjects. He
urged the policy of interest; for the Indians, unused to labor, died in
droves: they dropped in the fields beneath the whip; they escaped by
whole families to the mountains, and there perished with hunger; they
threw themselves into the water, and killed each other in the forests;
families committed suicide in concert;--there would soon be no laborers,
and the Spaniard could rob and murder, but would not toil. Brave
preacher, worthy mouth-piece of the humane Las Casas, what could he
effect against the terrible exigency of the situation? For here was a
colony, into which all the prisons of Spain had just been emptied to
repair a fai