d to promise great matters to Father Xavier; but the
effect did not answer the appearances: Meaco, which in the Japonian
tongue signifies a thing worth seeing, was no more than the shadow of
what formerly it had been, so terribly wars and fires had laid it waste.
On every side ruins were to be beheld, and the present condition of
affairs threatened it with a total destruction. All the neighbouring
princes were combined together against the Cubosama, and nothing was to
be heard but the noise of arms.

The man of God endeavoured to have gained an audience from the Cubosama,
and the Dairy, but he could not compass it: He could not so much as get
admittance to the Saso, or high-priest of the Japonian religion. To
procure him those audiences, they demanded no less than an hundred
thousand caixes, which amount to six hundred French crowns, and the
Father had it not to give. Despairing of doing any good on that side, he
preached in the public places by that authority alone which the Almighty
gives his missioners. As the town was all in confusion, and the thoughts
of every man taken up with the reports of war, none listened to him; or
those who casually heard him in passing by, made no reflections on what
he said.

Thus, after a fortnight's stay at Meaco to no purpose, seeing no
appearance of making converts amidst the disturbance of that place, he
had a strong impulse of returning to Amanguchi, without giving for lost
all the pains he had taken at Meaco; not only because of his great
sufferings, (and sufferings are the gains of God's apostles) but also
because at least he had preached Christ Jesus in that place, that is to
say, in the most idolatrous town of all the universe, and opened the
passage for his brethren, whom God had fore-appointed in the years
following, there to establish Christianity, according to the revelations
which had been given him concerning it.

He embarked on a river which falls from the adjoining mountains, and
washing the foot of the walls of Meaco, disembogues itself afterwards
into an arm of the sea, which runs up towards Sacay. Being in the ship,
he could not turn off his eyes from the stately town of Meaco; and, as
Fernandez tells us, often sung the beginning of the 113th Psalm, _In
exitu Israel de AEgypto, domus Jacob de populo Barbaro,_ &c. whether he
considered himself as an Israelite departing out of a land of infidels by
the command of God, or that he looked on that barbarous people, as one