of the inhabitants. At least, He did not
make them tremble, and if by chance He might have been mentioned in
a sermon, surely they would have sighed longingly, "Oh, that only
there were a God!" To the good Lord they paid little attention, as
the saints gave them enough to do. For those poor folk God had come
to be like those unfortunate monarchs who are surrounded by courtiers
to whom alone the people render homage.

San Diego was a kind of Rome: not the Rome of the time when the cunning
Romulus laid out its walls with a plow, nor of the later time when,
bathed in its own and others' blood, it dictated laws to the world--no,
it was a Rome of our own times with the difference that in place of
marble monuments and colosseums it had its monuments of sawali and its
cockpit of nipa. The curate was the Pope in the Vatican; the alferez
of the Civil Guard, the King of Italy on the Quirinal: all, it must be
understood, on a scale of nipa and bamboo. Here, as there, continual
quarreling went on, since each wished to be the master and considered
the other an intruder. Let us examine the characteristics of each.

Fray Bernardo Salvi was that silent young Franciscan of whom we
have spoken before. In his habits and manners he was quite different
from his brethren and even from his predecessor, the violent Padre
Damaso. He was thin and sickly, habitually pensive, strict in the
fulfilment of his religious duties, and careful of his good name. In
a month after his arrival nearly every one in the town had joined
the Venerable Tertiary Order, to the great distress of its rival,
the Society of the Holy Rosary. His soul leaped with joy to see about
each neck four or five scapularies and around each waist a knotted
girdle, and to behold the procession of corpses and ghosts in _guingon_
habits. The senior sacristan made a small fortune selling--or giving
away as alms, we should say--all things necessary for the salvation
of the soul and the warfare against the devil, as it is well known
that this spirit, which formerly had the temerity to contradict God
himself face to face and to doubt His words, as is related in the
holy book of Job, who carried our Lord Christ through the air as
afterwards in the Dark Ages he carried the ghosts, and continues,
according to report, to carry the _asuang_ of the Philippines, now
seems to have become so shamefaced that he cannot endure the sight of
a piece of painted cloth and that he fears the knots on a cor