If many pilgrimages could confer a title, this gentle-mannered Spaniard would assuredly have been thus decorated.  He had made almost every pilgrimage that the Church may dictate—­that wise old Church, which fills so well its vocation in the minds of the restless and the unsatisfied.  He had been many times to Rome.  He could tell you the specific properties of every shrine in the Roman Catholic world.  He made a sort of speciality in latter-day miracles.

Did this woman want a son to put a graceful finish to her family of daughters, he could tell her of some little-known pilgrimage in the mountains which rarely failed.

“Go,” he would say.  “Go there, and say your prayer.  It is the right thing to do.  The air of the mountains is delightful.  The journey diverts the mind.”

In all of which he was quite right.  And it was not for him, any more than it is for the profane reader, to inquire why latter-day miracles are nearly always performed at or near popular health resorts.

Was another in grief, Evasio Mon would send him on a long journey to a gay city, where the devout are not without worldly diversion in the evenings.

Neither was it upon hearsay only that he prescribed.  He had been to all these places, and tested them perhaps, which would account for his serene demeanour and that even health which he seemed to enjoy.  He had traveled without perturbment, it would seem, for his journeys had left no wrinkles on his bland forehead, neither was the light of restlessness in his quiet eyes.

He must have seen many cities, but cities are nearly all alike, and they grow more alike every day.  Many men also must he have met, but they seemed to have rubbed against him and left him unmarked—­as sandstone may rub against a diamond.  It is upon the sandstone that the scratch remains.  He was not part of all that he had seen, which may have meant that he looked not at men or cities, but right through them, to something beyond, upon which his gaze was always fixed.

Living as he did, in a city possessing so great a shrine as that of the “Virgen del Pilar,” the scene of a vision accorded to St. James when traveling through Spain, Mon naturally interested himself in the pilgrims, who came from all parts of the world to worship in the cathedral, who may be seen at any hour kneeling in the dim light of flickering candles before the altar rails.

Mon’s apartment, indeed, in the tall house next door to the Posada de los Reyes on the Paseo del Ebro was a known resort of the more cultured of the pilgrims, of these who came from afar; from Rome and from the farthest limits of the Roman Church—­from Warsaw to Minnesota.