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Show 136 BY PATH AND TKAIL. desolation of savagery, and devoted his life and his tal ents to the taming and uplifting of these brutalized men and women was a fool or a saint. This Father Salva-tierra, who first came to live and companion with them, was a Jesuit priest, and though terrible things have been said and written about the Jesuits, their bitterest ene mies never pilloried them as fools. " When we have delivered our attacks and exhausted our ammunition on the Jesuits, "' writes de Marcillac r " we must, as honorable foes, acknowledge they are, as a body, the greatest scholars and most fearless missiona ries known to the world. ' ' When I entered this curious little Indian and Mexi can village, Loretto, I carried with me a sense of rever ence for the place and of respect for the memory of the consecrated men whose sublime heroism stiii nves in the tradition of the simple people. The following morning, after assisting at the sacrifice of the mass offered up by a very dark, half- Indian priest, I entered the unpreten tious but well and cleanly kept graveyard to the rear of the church. All over the great Eepublic of Mexico, in Chiapas, Yucatan, Tabasco, in the states of Central America, wherever I went, I saw many things which I thought could be improved, but I must confess that their churches were always clean and their graveyards and cemeteries well looked after. The Spaniards, like the Jesuits, have been given hard knocks, but they were never charged with being an unclean people. The Latin Americans have inherited cleanliness from the Span iards. To me, who was fairly familiar with the humble but heroic history of Loretto, with the unspeakable degrada tion of the early tribes and the miracles of rehabilitation |