ew words--for I picked up a few sentences when in their ports."

"They will easily believe that you may have been wrecked," said
Malinche; "for they rescued a man who had been living many years
among a tribe at Yucatan, to the west of Tabasco. There were other
white men living among them, though these they could not recover.
You saw him by me this morning--he is an old man, a priest; and he
translates from the Spanish into the Yucatan dialect, which is so
like that of Tabasco that I can understand it, and then I tell the
people in Mexican.

"There will be no difficulty at all. Cortez and the Spaniards know
that I love them, and they trust me altogether, and I am able to do
good to my country people, and to intercede with them sometimes
with Cortez. Now tell me what has happened since I last saw you."

Roger gave her a sketch of what had happened in Mexico, and how he
had escaped, by flight, from being sacrificed.

"It is terrible--these sacrifices," Malinche said, shuddering. "I
did not think so in the old days, but I have learned better from
the Spaniards and from their priests; and I rejoice that the white
men will destroy these horrible idols, and will teach the people to
worship the great God and His Son. They will suffer--my heart
bleeds to think how they will suffer--but it will be good for them
in the end, and put a stop to rivers of blood that flow, every
year, at their altars."

Although Roger was not imbued with the passion for conversion which
animated the Spaniards, and led them to believe that it was the
most glorious of all duties to force their religion upon the
natives, he had been so filled with horror at the wholesale
sacrifices of human victims, and the cannibal feasts that followed
them, that he was in no way disposed to question the methods which
the Spaniards adopted to put a stop to such abominations. But for
the friendship of Cacama he would himself, assuredly, have been a
victim to these sanguinary gods.

He and his father had--like the Beggs, and many other of his
friends at Plymouth--been secretly followers of Wycliffe, but they
were still Catholics. They believed that there were many and deep
abuses in the Church, but had no thought of abandoning it
altogether. The doings of the Inquisition in Spain were regarded by
all Englishmen with horror, but these excesses were as nothing to
the wholesale horrors of the Mexican religion.

He talked for some time with Malinche, and saw that she