rtain nuns, yet the money in my purse was the
third of the income due from a chapelry, which I had been commissioned
to receive by a priest, who is one of my friends, so that the purse
does, in fact, contain blessed and sacred money."

"Let him eat his sin with his bread," exclaimed Rincon at that moment;
"I should be sorry to become bail for the profit he will obtain from it.
There will be a day of judgment at the last, when all things will have
to pass, as they say, through the holes of the colander, and it will
then be known who was the scoundrel that has had the audacity to plunder
and make off with the whole third of the revenue of a chapelry! But tell
me, Mr. Sacristan, on your life, what is the amount of the whole yearly
income?"

"Income to the devil, and you with it,[16]" replied the Sacristan, with
more rage than was becoming; "am I in a humour to talk to you about
income? Tell me, brother, if you know anything of the purse; if not, God
be with you--I must go and have it cried."

[16] (This footnote is missing from the printed edition.)

"That does not seem to me so bad a remedy," remarked Cortado; "but I
warn your worship not to forget the precise description of the purse,
nor the exact sum that it contains; for if you commit the error of a
single mite, the money will never be suffered to appear again while the
world is a world, and that you may take for a prophecy."

"I am not afraid of committing any mistake in describing the purse,"
returned the Sacristan, "for I remember it better than I do the ringing
of my bells, and I shall not commit the error of an atom." Saying this,
he drew a laced handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the
perspiration which rained down his face as from an alembic; but no
sooner had Cortado set eyes on the handkerchief, than he marked it for
his own.

When the Sacristan had got to a certain distance, therefore, Cortado
followed, and having overtaken him as he was mounting the steps of a
church, he took him apart, and poured forth so interminable a string of
rigmarole, all about the theft of the purse, and the prospect of
recovering it, that the poor Sacristan could do nothing but listen with
open mouth, unable to make head or tail of what he said, although he
made him repeat it two or three times.

Cortado meanwhile continued to look fixedly into the eyes of the
Sacristan, whose own were rivetted on the face of the boy, and seemed to
hang, as it were, on his words. This