up the Paraguay 57 



the Brazilian, now on the western, the Paraguayan, bank. 

 The Paraguay was known to men of European birth, 

 bore soldiers and priests and merchants as they sailed 

 and rowed up and down the current of its stream, and 

 beheld little towns and forts rise on its banks, long before 

 the Mississippi had become the white man's highway. 

 Now, along its upper course, the settlements are much 

 like those on the Mississippi at the end of the first quar- 

 ter of the last century; and in the not distant future it 

 will witness a burst of growth and prosperity much like 

 that which the Mississippi saw when the old men of to- 

 day were very young. 



In the early forenoon we stopped at a little Para- 

 guayan hamlet, nestling in the green growth under a 

 group of low hills by the river-brink. On one of these 

 hills stood a picturesque old stone fort, known as Fort 

 Bourbon in the Spanish, the colonial, days. Now the 

 Paraguayan flag floats over it, and it is garrisoned by a 

 handful of Paraguayan soldiers. Here Father Zahm 

 baptized two children, the youngest of a large family 

 of fair-skinned, light-haired small people, whose father 

 was a Paraguayan and the mother an "Oriental," or 

 Uruguayan. No priest had visited the village for three 

 years, and the children were respectively one and two 

 years of age. The sponsors included the local comman- 

 dante and a married couple from Austria. In answer to 

 what was supposed to be the perfunctory question 

 whether they were Catholics, the parents returned the 

 unexpected answer that they were not. Further ques- 

 tioning elicited the fact that the father called himself a 

 "free-thinking Catholic," and the mother said she was 



