shall be greatest?" Moreover, he had found it best in
his frequent talks to the people in the church during the week to omit
all reference to the evil methods of mankind in their dealings one
with another, and to pass over in silence the criminal aims and low
motives, and their externalization, which have marked the unfolding of
the human mind, and which the world preserves in its annals as
historical fact. The child seemed to divine the great truth that
history is but the record of human conduct, conduct manifesting the
mortal mind of man, a mind utterly opposed to the mind that is God,
and therefore unreal, supposititious, and bearing the "minus" sign.
Carmen would have none of it that did not reflect good. She refused
utterly to turn her mental gaze toward recorded evil.

"Padre," she once protested, "when I want to see the sun rise, I don't
look toward the west. And if you want to see the good come up, why do
you look at these stories of bad men and their bad thoughts?"

Jose admitted that they were records of the mortal mind--and the mind
that is mortal is _no_ mind.

"I am learning," he frequently said to himself, after Carmen had left
at the close of their day's work. "But my real education did not
commence until I began to see, even though faintly, that the Creator
is mind and infinite good, and that there is nothing real to the
belief in evil; that the five physical senses give us _no_ testimony
of any nature whatsoever; and that real man never could, never did,
fall."

Thus the days glided swiftly past, and Jose completed his first year
amid the drowsy influences of this little town, slumbering peacefully
in its sequestered nook at the feet of the green _Cordilleras_. No
further event ruffled its archaic civilization; and only with rare
frequency did fugitive bits of news steal in from the outer world,
which, to the untraveled thought of this primitive folk, remained
always a realm vague and mysterious. Quietly the people followed the
routine of their colorless existence. Each morn broke softly over the
limpid lake; each evening left the blush of its roseate sunset on the
glassy waters; each night wound its velvety arms gently about the
nodding town, while the stars beamed like jewels through the clear,
soft atmosphere above, or the yellow moonbeams stole noiselessly down
the old, sunken trail to dream on the lake's invisible waves.

Each month, with unvarying regularity, Rosendo came and went. At times