even amongst good Christians, has been known to give offence.

But be this as it may, San Francisco de Solano remained two years at Asuncion,
though whilst he lived there his powers of speech (according to the Jesuits)
seem to have been diminished, and he held no communication with the Indians
in their own languages. It may be that, like St. Paul, he preferred to speak,
when not with Indians, five words with his understanding
rather than ten thousand in an unknown tongue.

At the time of the first conquest Paraguay was almost entirely peopled
by the Guarani race.* It does not appear that their number
was ever very great, perhaps not exceeding a million
in the whole country. From the writings of Montoya, Guevara, Lozano,
and the other missionaries of the time, it is certain that they had attained
to no very high degree of civilization, though they were certainly
more advanced than their neighbours in the Gran Chaco.
It is most probable that they had not a single stone-built town,
or even a house, or that such a thing existed south of New Granada,
to the eastward of the Andes, for we may take the description in Schmidel's
`History of the Casa del Gran Moxo'** either as a mistake or as a story
which he had heard from some Peruvian Indian of the palaces of the Incas.
At any rate, no remains of stone-built houses, still less of palaces,
are known to have been found in Brazil or Paraguay.

--
* This race at one time spread from the Orinoco to the river Plate,
and even in the case of its offshoot, the Chiriguanas,
crossed to the west bank of the Paraguay. Padre Ruiz Montoya,
in his `Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay', cap. i.,
speaking of the Guarani race, says: `Domina ambos mares el del sur