l children crept
along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous
heads and thin necks, always sickly, though none of them managed to
die; afflicted by all the pains of anaemia, by boils that arose and
vanished on their faces, and watery eruptions covering their hands.
The shoemaker worked for the shops in the town, without, however,
earning much money. From the rising of the sun one could hear the
sound of his hammer in the cloister. This sole evidence of profane
work attracted all the unoccupied to the miserable and evil-smelling
dwelling. Mariano, the Tato, and a verger who also lived in the
cloister, were those who most frequently met Gabriel, seated on the
shoemaker's ragged and broken chairs, so low that one could touch the
floor of red and dusty bricks with one's hands.

Often the bell-ringer would run to his tower to ring the usual
bells, but his vacant place would be immediately occupied by an old
organ-blower, or some of the servants from the sacristy, all attracted
by what they heard of these meetings of the lower servants of the
Primacy. The object of the assembly was to listen to Gabriel. The
revolutionary wished to keep silence, and listened absently to their
grumblings at the daily round of worship; but his friends longed to
hear about those countries in which he had travelled, with all the
curiosity of people who lived confined and isolated; listening to his
descriptions of the beauties of Paris and the grandeur of London they
would open their eyes like children listening to a fairy tale.

The shoemaker with his head bent, never ceasing his work, listened
attentively to the recital of such marvels; when Gabriel was silent
they all agreed on one point, those cities must be far more beautiful
than Madrid; and just think how beautiful Madrid was! Even the
shoemaker's wife, standing in the corner forgetful of her sickly
children, would listen to Luna with wonder, her face enlivened by a
feeble smile, which showed the woman through the animal resigned to
misery, when Luna described the luxury of the women in foreign parts.

All these servants of the church felt their narrowed and dulled minds
stirred by these descriptions of a distant world that they were never
likely to see; the splendours of modern civilisation touched them much
more nearly than the beauties of heaven as described in the sermons,
and in the pungent and dusty atmosphere of the dirty little house they
would see unrolled