faith and his unbending
adhesion to the Church, the professors in the seminary had pushed him
on in his career, in spite of his ignorance; he was a son of the soil,
having been born in a village in the mountains round Toledo. The Holy
Metropolitan Church was to him the second house of God in the world,
only ranking after Saint Peter's in Rome, and all ecclesiastical
learning was to him like rays emanating from the Divine wisdom, which
blinded him, and were to be adored with the profound respect of
ignorance.

He had that blessed and entire want of education so appreciated by the
Church in former years. Gabriel felt sure that if Silver Stick had
been born in the flourishing times of Catholicism he would have become
a saint on dedicating himself to the spiritual life, or he would have
played an excellent part in the Inquisition on the arrival of that
militant society. Having come into the world at the wrong time, when
faith was weakened and the Church could no longer impose its laws
by violence, the good Don Antolin had remained hidden in the lower
administration of the Cathedral, assisting the Canon Obrero in the
division and assignment of the money that the State allowed to the
Primacy, giving long thought over the spending of each handful of
farthings, endeavouring that the holy house, like the ruined families,
should keep up its good outward appearance without revealing the
poverty inside.

He had been promised several times a chaplaincy of nuns, but he was
one of those faithful to the Cathedral, one of those quite in love
with the great establishment. He was proud of the confidence that the
Lord Archbishop placed in him, and of the frank friendliness
with which the canons and beneficiaries spoke to him, and of his
administrative conferences with the Obrero and the Treasurer. For this
reason he could not repress a gesture of contemptuous superiority when
having donned his pluvial, and clutching his silver stick, he advanced
and spoke to any strange clergy from the neighbouring villages who
visited the Primacy.

His faults were purely ecclesiastic; he saved in secret, with that
cold, determined avarice so usual at all times in people attached to
the Church. His greasy skull cap had been discarded as too old by its
former owner, one of the canons; his cassock of a greenish black and
his shoes had also belonged to some one of the beneficiaries; in the
Claverias they all whispered of the monies hoarded by Don Antolin