f reverend age
and a character of its own.

The trees waved in the wind like censers, the flowers, pale and
languid with an anaemic beauty, smelt of incense, as though the air
wafted through the doors of the Cathedral had changed their natural
perfumes.

The rain, trickling from the gargoyles and gutters of the roofs, was
collected in two large and deep stone tanks; sometimes the gardener's
pail would disturb their green covering, letting one perceive for an
instant the blue-blackness of their depths, but as soon as the circles
disappeared, the vegetation once more drew together and covered them
over afresh, without a movement, without a ripple, quiet and dead as
the temple itself in the stillness of the evening.

At the feast of Corpus, and that of the Virgin of the Sagrario in the
middle of August, the townspeople brought their pitchers into the
garden, and the Senor Esteban allowed them to be filled from these two
cisterns. It was an ancient custom and one much appreciated by the
old Toledans, who thought much of the fresh water of the Cathedral,
condemned as they were during the rest of the year to drink the red
and muddy liquid of the Tagus. At other times people came into the
garden to give little presents to Senor Esteban, the devout entrusted
him with palms for their images, or bought little bunches of flowers,
believing them to be better than those they could buy at the farms,
because they came from the Metropolitan Church, and the old women
begged branches of laurel for flavouring and for household medicines.
These incomings, and the two pesetas that the Chapter had assigned to
the gardener after the final dismemberment, helped the Senor Esteban
and his family to get on. When he was getting well on in years his
third son Gabriel was born, a child who from his fourth year attracted
the attention of all the women in the Claverias; his mother affirmed
with a blind faith that he was a living image of the Child Jesus that
the Virgin of the Sagrario held in her arms. Her sister Tomasa, who
was married to the "Virgin's Blue," and was the mother of a numerous
family which occupied nearly the half of the upper cloister, talked a
great deal about the intelligence of her little nephew, when he could
hardly speak, and about the infantile unction with which he gazed at
the images.

"He looks like a saint," she said to her friends. "You should see how
seriously he says his prayers.... Gabrielillo will become somebody;