continued he, “which thou soldest me at the port of Frenajoma?” “In truth,” replied Xavier, with a sedate and modest countenance, “I have never been a merchant in all my life, neither have I ever been at the port of Frenajoma.”  “What a beastly forgetfulness is this of thine,” pursued the Bonza, with an affected wonder, and keeping up his bold laughter, “how canst thou possibly forget it?” “Bring it back to my remembrance,” said Xavier mildly, “you, who have so much more wit, and a memory happier than mine.”  “That shall be done,” rejoined the Bonza, proud of the commendations which the saint had given him; “it is now just fifteen hundred years since thou and I, who were then merchants, traded at Frenajoma, and where I bought of thee a hundred bales of silk, at an easy pennyworth:  dost thou yet remember it?” The saint, who perceived whither the discourse tended, asked him, very civilly, “of what age he might be?” “I am now two-and-fifty,” said Fucarandono.  “How can it then be,” replied Xavier, “that you were a merchant fifteen hundred years ago, that is fifteen ages, when yet you have been in the world, by your own confession, but half an age? and how comes it that you and I then trafficked together at Frenajoma, since the greatest part of you Bonzas maintain, that Japan was a desart, and uninhabited at that time?” “Hear me,” said the Bonza, “and listen to me as an oracle; I will make thee confess that we have a greater knowledge of things past, than thou and thy fellows have of the present.  Thou art then to understand, that the world had no beginning, and that men, properly speaking, never die:  the soul only breaks loose from the body in which it was confined, and while that body is rotting under ground, is looking out for another fresh and vigorous habitation, wherein we are born again, sometimes in the nobler, sometimes in the more imperfect sex, according to the various constellations of the heavens, and the different aspects of the moon.  These alterations in our birth produce the like changes in our fortune.  Now, it is the recompence of those who have lived virtuously, to preserve a constant memory of all the lives which they have passed through, in so many ages; and to represent themselves, to themselves, entirely, such as they have been from all eternity, under the figure of a prince, of a merchant, of a scholar, of a soldier, and so many other various forms:  on the contrary, they who, like thee, are so ignorant of their own affairs, as not to understand who, or what they have been formerly, during those infinite revolutions of ages, shew that their crimes have deserved death, as often as they have lost the remembrance of their Jives in every change.”