who knows if we may not see him a bishop! Acolytes that I knew when
my father had charge of the sacristy now wear the mitre, and possibly
some day we may have one of them in Toledo."

The chorus of caresses and praises surrounded the first years of the
child like a cloud of incense; the family only lived for him, the
Senor Esteban, a father in the good old Latin style who loved his
sons, but was severe and stern with them in order that they might grow
up honourable, felt in the presence of the child a return of his own
youth; he played with him, and lent himself smilingly to all his
little caprices; his mother abandoned her household duties to please
him, and his brother hung on his babbling words. The eldest, Tomas,
the silent youth who had taken the place of his father in the care of
the garden, and who even in the depths of winter went barefooted over
the flower-beds and rough stones of the alleys, came up often bringing
handfuls of sweet-scented herbs, so that his little brother might play
with them. Esteban, the second, who was now thirteen and who enjoyed
a certain notoriety among the other acolytes on account of his
scrupulous care in assisting at the mass, delighted Gabriel with his
red cassock and his pleated tunic, and brought him taper ends and
little coloured prints, abstracted from the breviary of some canon.

Now and then he carried him in his arms to the store-room of the
giants, an immense room between the buttresses and the arches of the
nave, vaulted with stone. Here were the heroes of the ancient
feasts and holidays. The Cid with a huge sword, and four set pieces
representing as many parts of the world: huge figures with dusty and
tattered clothes and broken faces, which had once rejoiced the streets
of Toledo, and were now rotting under the roofs of its Cathedral. In
one corner reposed the Tarasca, a frightful monster of cardboard,
which terrified Gabriel when it opened its jaws, while on its wrinkled
back sat smiling, idiotically, a dishevelled and indecent doll, whom
the religious feeling of former ages had baptised with the name of
Anne Boleyn.

When Gabriel went to school all were astonished at his progress. The
youngsters of the upper cloister who were such a trial to "Silver
Stick," the priest charged with maintaining good order among the tribe
established in the roofs of the Cathedral, looked upon the little
Gabriel as a prodigy. When he could scarcely walk he could read
easily, and at sev