There is enough of such hardship in the residence of Alangalang, where four fathers and three brethren are employed, toiling in the vineyard of the Lord—­journeying on foot (as is our custom there) under sun and shower, through swamps and rivers, with the water often waist-deep; yet with much consolation and joy in the Lord, for whose love are undertaken these and like hardships.

Our brethren live in those villages well content at seeing that our Lord is continually gaining souls to Himself, and inclining to His holy law the hearts of those who but a few years ago were living without God and without law.  From the year 1600 to the year 1602, when I departed from those regions, two thousand six hundred and ninety-four persons had been baptized in that mission.  They attend with great punctuality the sermons, masses, and other divine services, which in that mission are celebrated with greater splendor and more punctiliousness than in others, through the advantage which it has in three choirs of Indians, who [in this service] surpass many Spaniards.  They are wont to sing the Salve to our Lady; on some days, the litany; and on the Fridays of Lent the Miserere to accompany the discipline—­all of which indicates the faith which burns and glows in their souls.

To that residence of Alangalang are annexed those of Ogmuc and Carigara, with seven or eight other villages; through these our fathers have dispersed (having made their retreat, in the course of the year for the [spiritual] exercises), being assigned [to certain villages] to instruct their people.  The superior, Father Mateo Sanchez, took charge of the newer villages, in order to build there churches and establish stations convenient for the affairs of those Christian churches—­as he did in the village of Lingayon, and in others.  On the way, he baptized in Barugo twenty-five adults, and in Carigara sixty-three.

At the residence of Ogmuc we had completed a church, one of the finest in that island, through the diligence and labors of Father Alonso Rodriguez, who spent a long time there.  Father Francisco de Enzinas went to that residence, and baptized one hundred and two persons; of these eighty-one were adults, and among them some old men.  These last asked for baptism, as it seemed, with reason, saying that they were already at the gates of death, and they ought to be most favored since they were most needy.  They asked questions about the life eternal; and while the father was explaining to them the resurrection of the body he was aided, by a man recently baptized, with the simile of the serpent, which sheds and then renews its skin, and with other comparisons of that sort.  On his road the same father visited a little village, called Baibai, and baptized there ninety persons, of whom eighty-seven were adults.