ng eyes,
manifested his great joy by clasping the priest in his brawny arms.

"But remember, Rosendo," Jose said, "learning is not _knowing_. I can
only teach her book-knowledge. But even now, an untutored child, she
knows more that is real than I do."

"Ah, Padre, have I not told you many times that she is not like us?
And now you know it!" exclaimed the emotional Rosendo, his eyes
suffused with tears of joy as he beheld his cherished ideals and his
longing of years at last at the point of realization. What he, too,
had instinctively seen in the child was now to be summoned forth; and
the vague, half-understood motive which had impelled him to take the
abandoned babe from Badillo into the shelter of his own great heart
would at length be revealed. The man's joy was ecstatic. With a final
clasp of the priest's hand, he rushed from the house to plunge into
the work in progress at the church.

Jose summoned Carmen into the quiet of his own dwelling. She came
joyfully, bringing an ancient and obsolete arithmetic and a much
tattered book, which Jose discovered to be a chronicle of the heroic
deeds of the early _Conquistadores_.

"I'm through decimals!" she exclaimed with glistening eyes; "and I've
read some of this, but I don't like it," making a little _moue_ of
disgust and holding aloft the battered history.

"Padre Rosendo told me to show it to you," she continued. "But it is
all about murder, you know. And yet," with a little sigh, "he has
nothing else to read, excepting old newspapers which the steamers
sometimes leave at Bodega Central. And they are all about murder, and
stealing, and bad things, too. Padre, why don't people write about
good things?"

Jose gazed at her reverently, as of old the sculptor Phidias might
have stood in awe before the vision which he saw in the unchiseled
marble.

"Padre Rosendo helped me with the fractions," went on the girl,
flitting lightly to another topic; "but I had to learn the decimals
myself. He couldn't understand them. And they are so easy, aren't
they? I just love arithmetic!" hugging the old book to her little
bosom.

Both volumes, printed in Madrid, were reliques of Spanish colonial
days.

"Read to me, Carmen," said Jose, handing her the history.

The child took the book and began to read, with clear enunciation, the
narrative of Quesada's sanguinary expedition to Bogota, undertaken in
the name of the gentle Christ. Jose wondered as he listened what
interpretati