CHAPTER XXIV.

AGUASSAI.

THE day following our race into this village was Good Friday. Early in the morning, I arose and inquired my way to the aguaia or watering place. It was a small stream close to the village, down a deep and broad ravine, which indicated that the gentle stream sometimes assumed formidable proportions. Here the village women do their clothes-washing, and retail the simple gossip of their social world of forty houses. But this morning silence reigned supreme, for it was Viernes Santo, Holy Friday; and they must abstain from the luxury of bathing. As I believe that bodily cleanliness has some connection with the "cleanliness that is next to godliness," I took a comfortable bath, much, perhaps, to the astonishment of the little Catholic who was good enough to pioneer me to the water.

There is a church here, but no resident padre. One comes principally when sent for to visit the sick and bury the dead, but these are casualties of infrequent occurrence, when he improves the occasion by celebrating baptisms and marriages, and the Misa.

It is remarkable how these people, with few opportunities of hearing their duty, with no Bible, and few religious books, with no daily prayers, except their own private devotions, perhaps, yet seem to keep alive among them a veneration for things sacred, and endeavour, and succeed very well, to keep up those relations of mutual amity which Christianity emphatically teaches. But one misses here the noisy outburst of childish spirits on the daily dismissal of a village school, and the cheerful invitation to prayer of the Sunday bell.

Returning to the house, I overheard Mr M'Donald and M. Wilhelm in controversy. M. Wilhelm was saying:

"You religionist gentlemen do violence to the universal law of development. The quod prius

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principle does not seem to be always and at all times, and in all circumstances, fit and proper. respect age; and the older an honourable man becomes, the more I honour him. He has run the race of his age. Perhaps he has not been the victor, but with others he has been one of the competitors without whom there could have been no race. His strength, and speed, and power of endurance have been put in request, and manfully exerted. And now, as one of the emeriti, he rests on his laurels, and lives recalling the times gone by. In a word, he is effete. A new generation of racers has sprung up, taught by him, but adapting their lessons to the emergencies of the present.

"A tree grows up, bears its fruit, produces its young sprouts, and dies. Its dead trunk and leaves afford nourishment to the younger growth; they feed upon its decayed body and gather strength and proportion. But the young and the old are not identical, for everything of the younger trees is theirs distinctly, and the definement well marked. Their root is their own root,

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and not the root of the mother tree; so also with the trunk and branches, and every other part.

Now, some of you are striving against an overwhelming current which is increasing in strength and size every day. And why this unavailable effort of opposition to the stream? Shall I say-It is that you may establish as fact that which is not fact. That you may intertwine young roots among the dead old roots, and raise up a body of young trunks within the decayed old trunks, and young branches and leaves to overlay the dried sticks and leaves. And this you call the ever living verdure of the original tree! Absurd. It is worse than the pageantry of the enthronement and exhibition of the livid corpse of an infallible potentate just released from the manipulations of the taxidermist; a mimicry of life and death."

"The charge," replied M'Donald, "is not applicable to the general body of my countrymen, who, abandoning the errors you speak of, cling only to the written word."

"We have evangelists in our own country too,"

said M. Wilhelm; "but these are not much happier. You remember your countrymen, the Covenanters, the Roundheads, Puritans, or whatever they were called, abandoning the spirit of the written word, which, I grant you, has an enduring life, and clinging only to the letter, fell into the error and deadly sin of intestine bloodshed, while they vainly believed that they were drawing the sword of Gideon, which was raised only against an alien race."

Our guide, 'Nor Gabriel Vibenes, who was mending a pair of travelling trousers, asked what so excited them; for they were speaking in English, with which language our guide was very slightly acquainted. When he heard the nature of the conversation he said:

"I have heard that heretics are never agreed, and are always troubled in mind, until they return to the peaceful bosom of Holy Mother Church."

"Yes!" answered the German, "that Mother knows well how to stifle the sobs of her children, and lull them to a drugged rest. The case of the