street and saluted
me all together, uncovering their heads, and making a low bow. I,
inclining my head, removed my cap and passed on. They appreciated my
politeness, and considered themselves so favored and honored by it
that, upon my return, they displayed the same courtesy, standing in
line, and then they all fell upon their knees, as if they desired to
excel me in politeness; for that which I had shown them when I first
approached seemed to them all too much. My greatest aid to them was
at Lian, three leguas from Balayan, in which place--as well as in
another near by, called Manisua--I converted many to Christianity
and heard many confessions. I was here on Ash Wednesday; not only did
the adults receive the ashes with incredible reverence and devotion,
but all the mothers brought all their children to receive the emblem,
and were not willing to depart until they and all the others had
received. For this journey I thank and am deeply grateful to the
bishop who was most earnestly desirous that Ours should aid in so
important a ministry. As it was clearly evident that the villages
of Taitai, Antipolo, and others of that encomienda--which was six
leguas from Manila, up the river, and in which there were already
some Christians--contained many infidels who should be converted,
he entrusted it to the Society. Through the grace of Jesus Christ our
Lord, such fruitful results were accomplished as shall be seen in the
course of this narrative. I shall simply state for the present that,
at the end of ten years, I was in the habit of saying (in imitation of
St. Gregory Thaumaturgus) that I was most thankful to our Lord, for,
when I entered the place, I found hardly forty Christians, and at the
end of that time there were not four infidels. If I am not mistaken,
we baptized with our own hands more than seven thousand souls; and
today it is one of the most flourishing of Christian communities that
Holy Church possesses, and none in those regions is superior to it.

How the village of Taitai improved its site. Chapter IX.

At that time the village of Taitai lay along the water, on the
banks of a marsh or stream formed by waterfalls from the mountains
of Antipolo, which emptied into the river near the same mouth by
which it flows out of the lagoon. It was situated in a most beautiful
and extensive valley, formed between the lagoon and the mountains;
and so low that each year, when the waters of the lagoon rise on
account of