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 heterodox of the absolute need of a church.  I earnestly wish that there could be such an increase in the personnel and equipment of the Catholic Church in South America as to permit the establishment of one good and earnest priest in every village or little community in the far interior.  Nor is there any inconsistency between this wish and the further wish that there could be a marked extension and development of the native Protestant churches, such as I saw established here and there in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, and of the Y. M. C. Associations.  The bulk of these good people who profess religion