ck. He was no longer young, but he
had a frame like iron, and in his time he had possessed a force of
arm and muscle enough to fell an ox. His strength and daring were
acknowledged by all the mountain-folks from Corellia to Barga, hardy
fellows, and judges of what a man can do. Moreover, Fra Pacifico
was more than six feet high--and who does not respect a man of such
inches? In fair fight he had killed his man--a brigand chief--who
prowled about the mountains toward Carrara. His band had fled and
never returned.

Fra Pacifico had stood with his strong feet planted on the earth,
over the edge of a rocky precipice--by which the high-road passed--and
seized a furious horse dragging a cart holding six poor souls
below. Fra Pacifico had found a shepherd of Corellia--one of his
flock--struck down by fever on a rocky peak some twenty miles distant,
and he had carried him on his back, and laid him on his bed at home.
Every one had some story to tell of his prowess, coolness, and manly
daring. When he walked along the streets, the ragged children--as
black with sun and dirt as unfledged ravens--sidled up to him, and,
looking up into his gray eyes, ran between his firm-set legs, plucked
him by the cassock, and felt in his pockets for an apple or a cake.
Then the children held him tight until he had raised them up and
kissed them.

Spite of the labors of the previous night (no one had worked harder),
Fra Pacifico had risen with daybreak. His office accustomed him to
little sleep. There was no time by day or night that he could call his
own. If any one was stricken with sickness in the night, or suddenly
seized for death in those pale hours when the day hovers, half-born,
over the slumbering earth, Fra Pacifico must rise and wake his
acolyte, the baker's boy, who, going late to bed, was hard to rouse.
Along with him he must grope up and down slippery steps, and along
dark alleys, bearing the Host under a red umbrella, until he had
placed it within the dying lips. If a baby was weakly, or born before
its time, and, having given one look at this sorrowful world, was
about to lose its eyes on it forever, Fra Pacifico must run out at any
moment to christen it.

There was no doctor at Corellia, the people were too poor; so Fra
Pacifico was called upon to do a doctor's duty. He must draw the teeth
of such as needed it; bind up cuts and sores; set limbs; and give
such simple drugs as he knew the nature of. He must draw up papers for