ce. Here
and there prairie fires burned, and the red glow warred with the
moon's radiance.

Next morning was overcast. Occasionally we passed a wood-yard, or
factory, or cabin, now on the eastern, the Brazilian, now on the
western, the Paraguayan, bank. The Paraguay was known to men of
European birth, bore soldiers and priests and merchants as they sailed
and rowed up and down the current of its stream, and beheld little
towns and forts rise on its banks, long before the Mississippi had
become the white man's highway. Now, along its upper course, the
settlements are much like those on the Mississippi at the end of the
first quarter of the last century; and in the not distant future it
will witness a burst of growth and prosperity much like that which the
Mississippi saw when the old men of today were very young.

In the early forenoon we stopped at a little Paraguayan hamlet,
nestling in the green growth under a group of low hills by the river-
brink. On one of these hills stood a picturesque old stone fort, known
as Fort Bourbon in the Spanish, the colonial, days. Now the Paraguayan
flag floats over it, and it is garrisoned by a handful of Paraguayan
soldiers. Here Father Zahm baptized two children, the youngest of a
large family of fair-skinned, light-haired small people, whose father
was a Paraguayan and the mother an "Oriental," or Uruguayan. No priest
had visited the village for three years, and the children were
respectively one and two years of age. The sponsors included the local
commandante and a married couple from Austria. In answer to what was
supposed to be the perfunctory question whether they were Catholics,
the parents returned the unexpected answer that they were not. Further
questioning elicited the fact that the father called himself a "free-
thinking Catholic," and the mother said she was a "Protestant
Catholic," her mother having been a Protestant, the daughter of an
immigrant from Normandy. However, it appeared that the older children
had been baptized by the Bishop of Asuncion, so Father Zahm at the
earnest request of the parents proceeded with the ceremony. They were
good people; and, although they wished liberty to think exactly as
they individually pleased, they also wished to be connected and to
have their children connected with some church, by preference the
church of the majority of their people. A very short experience of
communities where there is no church ought to convince the most
h