eared. As a son of its faith, Gabriel Luna was
to have been a priest; but before he became a minister of its faith,
it meant almost the same that he should become a Carlist soldier, and
fight on for that cause till it was hopeless. In his French captivity
he loses the faith which was one with the Carlist cause, and in
England he reads Darwin and becomes an evolutionist of the ardor which
the evolutionists have now lost. He wanders over Europe with the
English girl whom he worships with an intellectual rather than
passionate ardor, and after her death he ends at Barcelona in time to
share one of the habitual revolutions of the province and to spend
several years in one of its prisons. When he comes out it is into a
world which he is doomed to leave; he is sick to death and in hopeless
poverty; he has lost the courage of his revolutionary faith if not his
fealty to it; all that he asks of the world is leave to creep out of
it and somewhere die in peace. He thinks of an elder brother who like
himself was born in the precincts of the Cathedral where generations
of their family have lived and died, and his brother does not deny
him. In fact the kind, dull gardener welcomes him to a share of his
poverty, and Gabriel begins dying where he began living. The kindness
between the brothers is as simple in the broken adventurer whose wide
world has failed him as in the aging peasant, pent from his birth in
the Cathedral close, with no knowledge of anything beyond it. All
their kindred who serve in their several sort the stepmother church,
down to the gardener's son whose office is to keep dogs out of the
Cathedral and has the title of _perrero_, are good to the returning
exile. They do not well understand what and where he has been; the
tradition of his gifted youth when he was dedicated to the church and
forsook her service at the altar for her service in the field, remains
unquestioned, and he is safe in the refuge of his family who can offer
mainly their insignificance for his protection. The logic of the fact
is perfect, and Gabriel's emergence from the quiet of his retreat
inevitably follows from the nature of the agitator as the logic of
his own past and has the approval at least of the _perrero_ and the
allegiance of the rest. What is very important in the affair is that
most of the inhabitants of this Cathedral-world, rich and poor, good,
bad, and indifferent, mean and generous, are few of them wicked
people, as wickedness i