the
Vascongados[1] mountains would be able to remedy everything when he
came down into the plains of Castille. But years passed by, Amadeus
had come and gone, they had even proclaimed a republic! And yet the
cause of God did not seem to advance much, and Heaven seemed deaf. A
republican deputy proclaimed a war against God, challenging Him to
silence him; and so impiety stalked along immune and triumphant, and
its eloquence flowed abroad like a poisonous spring.

[Footnote 1: Provinces of Alava, Guipuscoa, and the lordship of
Biscay.]

Gabriel lived in a state of bellicose excitement--he forgot his books,
he disregarded his future, he never thought now of singing his mass.
What would happen to his career now that the Church was in peril, and
that the sleepy poetry of past ages, that had enveloped him from his
cradle like a perfumed cloud of old incense and dried roses, was on
the point of vanishing?

Often some of the pupils disappeared from the seminary, and the
professors would reply to the inquiries of the curious with a sly
wink.

"They have gone out--with the good sort. They could not see quietly
what was happening--'child's play,' 'follies.'"

But nevertheless such follies made them smile with paternal
satisfaction.

He thought to be himself among those who fled, as the world seemed
to be coming to an end. In certain towns the revolutionary mob had
invaded and profaned the churches; as yet they had not murdered any of
the ministers of God as in other revolutions, but still the priests
were unable to go about the streets in their cassocks for fear of
being hooted and insulted. The remembrance of the archbishops of
Toledo, those brave ecclesiastical princes, implacable warriors
against the infidels, fired his warlike feelings. As yet he had never
been away from Toledo, away from the shadow of its Cathedral; Spain
seemed to him as vast as all the rest of the world put together, and
he began to feel the ardent desire of seeing something new, of seeing
closer all the wonderful things he had read about in his books,
stirring within him.

One day he kissed his mother's hand, without feeling any very great
emotion towards the trembling and nearly blind old woman, for the
seminary had for him more tender memories than the house of his
fathers, smoked his last cigar with his brothers in the garden without
revealing his intentions to them, and that night he fled from Toledo
with a scapulary of the Heart of Jesus se