by them that the curse of God attended us wheresoever we went; that
we were always followed by the grasshoppers, that pest of Abyssinia,
which carried famine and destruction over all the country; that he,
seeing no grasshoppers following us when we passed by their village,
began to doubt of the reality of what the priests had so confidently
asserted, and was now convinced that the representation they made of
us was calumny and imposture. This discourse gave us double
pleasure, both as it proved that God had confuted the accusations of
our enemies, and defended us against their malice without any
efforts of our own, and that the people who had shunned us with the
strongest detestation were yet lovers of truth, and came to us on
their own accord. Nothing could be more grossly absurd than the
reproaches which the Abyssinian ecclesiastics aspersed us and our
religion with. They had taken advantage of the calamity that
happened the year of our arrival: and the Abyssins, with all their
wit, did not consider that they had often been distressed by the
grasshoppers before there came any Jesuits into the country, and
indeed before there were any in the world.

Whilst I was in these mountains, I went on Sundays and saints' days
sometimes to one church and sometimes to another. One day I went
out with a resolution not to go to a certain church, where I
imagined there was no occasion for me, but before I had gone far, I
found myself pressed by a secret impulse to return back to that same
church. I obeyed the influence, and discovered it to proceed from
the mercy of God to three young children who were destitute of all
succour, and at the point of death. I found two very quickly in
this miserable state; the mother had retired to some distance that
she might not see them die, and when she saw me stop, came and told
me that they had been obliged by want to leave the town they lived