sight it seems wholly black, but upon a nearer view it looks blue; the excellency of its song is that it harmoniously and articulately pronounces the name of Jesus Christ.  A third remarks, “they (the heathen) are excited by the heavens forming a cross under the zone; they are excited by the mountains which have the cross carved on them, without knowing by whom; they are excited by the earth which draws the crucifix in its fruit called Nicefo.”  Yet all these things are of little force to move the hearts of those Gentiles who scoffingly cry, “When we are sick, forsooth, the wood of this cross will cure us!” Another father, resolving to denounce certain heathen practices, placed on the Feast of Purification an image of the Virgin in relievo upon the altar, and “with a dagger struck through her breast on which the blood followed:”  like Mark Antony, he “improved the occasion,” and sent home the fathers of families to thrash their wives and daughters who were shut up in the “paint houses.”  It is gravely related how a hungry friar dines copiously on fish with an angel; how another was saved by the “father of miracles, the glorious Saint Anthony of Padua,” whom another priest, taking as his patron, sees before his hammock.  A woman, bearing a child in her arms and supposed to be the Virgin, attends the Portuguese army, and she again appears in the shape of a “beautiful beggar.”  The miraculous resurrection of a boiled cock is gravely chronicled.  A certain man lived 380 years “at the intercession of Saint Francis d’Assise.”  Of course, the missioners saw water-monsters in the Congo River.  A child “came from his mother’s womb with a beard and all his teeth, perhaps to show he was born into the world grown old in vice.”  A certain scoffer “being one day to pass a river with two companions, was visibly taken up by an invisible hand into the air.  One of his companions, going to take hold of him by the feet, had such a cuff given him that he fell down in the boat, and the offender was seen no more.”  Father Merolla talks of a breed in the Cabo Verde Islands “between bulls and she-asses, which they compassed by binding a cow’s hide upon the latter:”  it would be worth inquiring if this was ever attempted, and it might add to our traditions about the “Jumart.”  And the tale of the elephant-hunters deceiving the animals by anointing themselves with their droppings deserves investigation.  Wounds of poisoned arrows are healed by that which produced them.  A woman’s milk cures the venomous foam which cobras spit into the eyes.  A snake as big as a beam kills and consumes men with its look.  An “ill liver,” reprimanded by his father for vicious inclinations, fires a pistol at him; the rebound of the bullet from the paternal forehead, which remains whole, severely wounds the would-be parricide:  the ablest surgeons cannot heal the hurt, and the flesh ever continues to be sore and raw upon the forehead, acting like the brand of Cain.