the grave reigned where
previously the population of a small town had gathered and crowded.
The Government of Madrid (and you should have seen the expression of
contempt with which the old gardener emphasised those words) was in
treaty with the Holy Father to arrange something called the Concordat.
The number of canons was limited as though the Holy Metropolitan was
a college, they were to be paid by the Government the same as the
servants, and for the maintenance of worship in this most famous
Cathedral of all Spain--which, when it formerly collected its tithe,
scarcely knew where to lock up such riches--a monthly pension of
twelve hundred pesetas was now granted.

"One thousand two hundred pesetas, Tomas!" said he to his son, a
silent boy, who took very little interest in anything but his garden.
"One thousand two hundred pesetas, when I can remember the Cathedral
having more than six millions of revenue! Bad times are in store for
us, and were I anyone else I would bring you up to an office, or
something outside the church; but the Lunas cannot desert the cause of
God, like so many traitors who have betrayed it. Here we were born,
here we must die, to the very last one of the family." And furious
with the clergy, who seemed to put a good face on the Concordat and
their salaries, thankful to have come out of the revolutionary tumults
even as well as they had done, he isolated himself in his garden,
locking the door in the iron railing, and shrinking from the
assemblies of former times!

His little floral world did not change, its sombre verdure was like
the twilight that had enveloped the gardener's soul. It had not the
brilliant gaiety, overflowing with colours and scents of a garden in
the open, bathed in full sunlight, but it had the shady and melancholy
beauty of a conventual garden between four walls, with no more light
than what came through the eaves and the arcades, and no other birds
but those flying above, who looked with wonder at this little paradise
at the bottom of a well. The vegetation was the same as that of the
Greek landscapes, and of the idylls of the Greek poets--laurels,
cypress and roses, but the arches that surrounded it, with their
alleys paved with great slabs of granite in whose interstices wreaths
of grass grew, the cross of its central arbour, the mouldy smell of
the old iron railings, and the damp of the stone buttresses coloured a
soft green by the rain, gave the garden an atmosphere o