" said the Vicar.

"They have offshoots: of which I knew but one in Italy, that settled
some fifty years back in a monastery they call Buon-Solazzo, outside
Florence, at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. But I have
been making question of our guests through Dom Basilio, their
guest-master and abbot _de facto_ (since their late abbot, an old man
whom he calls Dom Polifilo, died of exposure on the mountains some
three days before they embarked); and it appears that they belong to
a second colony, which has made its home for these ten years at
Casalabriva in Corsica, having arrived by invitation of the Queen
Emilia of that island, and there abiding until the Genoese burned the
roof over their heads."

The Vicar sipped his wine.

"You have considered," he asked, "the peril of introducing so many
papists into our quiet parish?"

"I have not considered it for a moment," answered my father,
cheerfully. "Nor have I introduced them. But if you fear they'll
convert--pervert--subvert--invert your parishioners and turn 'em into
papists, I can reassure you. For in the first place thirty men, or
thirty thousand, of whom only one can open his mouth, are, for
proselytizing, equal to one man and no more."

"They can teach by their example if not by their precept," urged the
Vicar.

"Their example is to sleep in their coffins. My good sir, if you
will not trust your English doctrine to its own truth, you might at
least rely on the persuasiveness of its comforts. Nay, pardon me, my
friend," he went on, as the Vicar's either cheekbone showed a red
flush, "I did not mean to speak offensively; but, Englishman though I
am, in matters of religion my countrymen are ever a puzzle to me.
At a great price you won your freedom from the Bishop of Rome and his
dictation. I admire the price and I love liberty; yet liberty has
its drawbacks, as you have for a long while been discovering; of
which the first is that every man with a maggot in his head can claim
a like liberty with yourselves, quoting your own words in support of
it. Let me remind you of that passage in which Rabelais--borrowing,
I believe, from Lucian--brings the good Pantagruel and his
fellow-voyagers to a port which he calls the Port of Lanterns.
'There (says he) upon a tall tower Pantagruel recognized the Lantern
of La Rochelle, which gave us an excellent clear light. Also we saw
the Lanterns of Pharos, of Nauplia, and of the Acropolis of Athens,
sacred to