The king heard him with attention, and without interrupting his discourse; but he also dismissed him without answering a word, or making any sign, whether he allowed or disapproved of what he said.  This silence, accompanied with much humanity, was taken for a permission, by Father Xavier, to continue his public preaching.  He did so with great warmth, but with small success:  Most of them laughed at the preacher, and scorned the mysteries of Christianity:  Some few, indeed, grew tender at the hearing of our Saviour’s sufferings, even so far as to shed tears, and these motions of compassion disposed their hearts to a belief; but the number of the elect was inconsiderable; for the time pre-ordained for the conversion of that people was not yet come, and was therefore to be attended patiently.

Xavier then having made above a month’s abode in Amanguchi, and gathered but small fruit of all his labours, besides affronts, continued his voyage towards Meaco with his three companions, Fernandez, Matthew, and Bernard.  They continually bemoaned the blindness and obduracy of those wretches, who refused to receive the gospel; yet cheered up themselves with the consideration of God’s mercies, and an inward voice was still whispering in their hearts, that the seed of the divine word, though cast into a barren and ungrateful ground, yet would not finally be lost.

They departed toward the end of December, in a season when the rains were continually falling, during a winter which is dreadful in those parts, where the winds are as dangerous by land as tempests are at sea.  The colds are pinching, and the snow drives in such abundance, that neither in the towns nor hamlets, people dare adventure to stir abroad, nor have any communication with each other, but by covered walks and galleries:  It is yet far worse in the country, where nothing is to be seen but hideous forests, sharp-pointed and ragged mountains, raging torrents across the vallies, which sometimes overflow the plains.  Sometimes it is so covered over with ice, that the travellers fall at every step; without mentioning those prodigious icicles hanging over head from the high trees, and threatening the passengers at every moment with their fall.

The four servants of God travelled in the midst of this hard season, and rough ways, commonly on their naked feet, passing the rivers, and ill accommodated with warm clothes, to resist the inclemencies of the air and earth, loaden with their necessary equipage, and without other provisions of life than grains of rice roasted or dried by the fire, which Bernard carried in his wallet.  They might have had abundantly for their subsistence, if Xavier would have accepted of the money which the Portuguese merchants of Firando offered him, to defray the charges of his voyage, or would have made use of what the governor of the Indies had supplied him with in the name of the king of Portugal:  But he thought he should have affronted