rsecutions.

He went out into the cloister, and, resting his elbows on the
balustrade, looked down into the garden.

The Claverias seemed quite deserted. The children who had enlivened
them in the early morning had gone to school, the women were inside
their houses preparing their mid-day meal, there seemed to be no one
in the cloister except himself; the sunlight bathed all one side,
and the shadow of the pillars cut obliquely the great golden spaces
flooding the pavement. The majestic silence, the holy calm of the
Cathedral overpowered the agitator like a gentle narcotic. The seven
centuries surrounding those stones seemed to him like so many veils
hiding him from the rest of the world. In one of the dwellings of the
Claverias you could hear the incessant tap, tap, of a hammer; it was
that of a shoemaker whom Gabriel had seen through the window-panes,
bending over his bench. In the square of sky framed by the roofs some
pigeons were flying, lazily moving their wings, soaring in the vault
of intense blue; some flew down into the cloister, and, perching on
the balustrade, broke the religious silence with their gentle cooing;
now and again the heavy door-curtains of the church were lifted, and
a breath of air charged with incense floated over the garden of the
Claverias, together with the deep notes of the organ, and the sound of
voices chanting Latin words and solemnly prolonging the cadences.

Gabriel looked at the garden surrounded by its arcades of white stone,
with its rough buttresses of dark granite, in the chinks of which the
rain had left an efflorescence of fungus, like little tufts of black
velvet. The sun struck on one angle of the garden, leaving the rest
in cool green shade, a conventual twilight. The bell-tower hid one
portion of the sky, displaying on its reddish sides, ornamented with
Gothic tracery and salient buttresses, the fillets of black marble
with heads of mysterious personages, and the shields with the arms of
the different archbishops who had assisted at its building; above,
near the pinnacles of white stone, were seen the bells behind enormous
gratings; from below they looked like three bronze birds in a cage of
iron.

Three deep strokes from a bell, echoing round the Cathedral, announced
that the High Mass had arrived at its most solemn moment, the mountain
of stone seemed to tremble with the vibration, which was transmitted
through the naves and galleries, to the arcades and down to the