n by their least complaint, and he failed not to rise to their
relief.

He returned to his prayers at break of day, after which he celebrated
mass. He employed the forenoon in the hospitals, particularly in that of
the lepers, which is in one of the suburbs of Goa. He embraced those
miserable creatures one after the other, and distributed amongst them
those alms which he had been begging for them from door to door. After
this he visited the prisons, and dealt amongst them the same effects of
charity.

In coming back, he made a turn about the town, with his bell in his hand,
and gave a loud summons to the fathers of families, that, for the love of
God, they would send their children and their slaves to catechism.

The holy man was convinced in his heart, that if the Portuguese youth
were well instructed in the principles of religion, and formed betimes to
the practice of good life, Christianity, in a little time, would be seen
to revive in Goa; but in case the children grew up without instruction or
discipline, there was no remaining hope, that they who sucked in impiety
and vice, almost with their milk, should ever become sincere Christians.

The little children gathered together in crowds about him, whether they
came of their own accord, through a natural curiosity, or that their
parents sent them, out of the respect which they already had for the holy
man, howsoever vicious themselves. He led them to the church, and there
expounded to them the apostles' creed, the commandments of God, and all
the practices of devotion which are in use amongst the faithful.

These tender plants received easily the impressions which the father made
on them, and it was through these little babes that the town began to
change its face. For, by daily hearing the man of God, they became modest
and devout; their modesty and devotion was a silent censure of that
debauchery which appeared in persons of riper age. Sometimes they even
reproved their fathers, with a liberty which had nothing of childish in
it, and their reproofs put the most dissolute libertines to the blush.

Xavier then proceeded to public preaching, whither all the people
flocked; and to the end that the Indians might understand, as well as the
Portuguese, he affected to speak that language in a gross and clownish
dialect, which passed at that time amongst the natives of the country. It
was immediately seen what power a preacher, animated by the spirit of
God, had over th