“El pare San Bernat!...  Que traguen al pare San Bernat!  Father Saint Bernard!...  Let them fetch father Saint Bernard!”

The men looked at each other uneasily.  Nobody could handle a matter like this so well as the glorious patron.  It was now high time to have recourse to him, as had so often been done before, and get him to perform his miracle.

They ought to go to the City Council, and compel the big guns there, in spite of their scepticism, to bring the saint out for the consolation of the poor.

In an hour a veritable army was formed.  Mobs issued from the dark lanes, paddling in the water like frogs, and raising their war-cry:  “San Bernat!  San Bernat!”; the men, with their sleeves and trousers rolled up, or even entirely naked save for the sash that is never removed from the skin of a Valencian peasant; the women, with their skirts raised over their heads for protection, sinking their tanned, skinny, over-worked legs into the slime, and all drenched from head to foot, the wet clothes sticking to their bodies; and at the head, a number of strong young men with four-wicked tapers lighted, sputtering and crackling in the rain and casting a weird flickering radiance back over the clamoring multitude.

“San Bernat!  San Bernat!...  Viva el pare San Bernat! Father Saint Bernard, viva!”

Under the drizzle pouring from the sky and the streams tumbling from the eavespouts, the mob rushed along through the streets in a wild riot.  Doors and windows flew open, and new voices were added to the delirious uproar, while at every crossing recruits would come to swell the on-rushing avalanche headed for the Ayuntamiento.  Muskets, ancient blunderbusses, and horse-pistols as big as guns, could be seen in the menacing throng, as though those wild forms were to compel the granting of a petition that might be denied, or to slay the river, perhaps.

The alcalde, with all the members of the council, was waiting at the door of the City Hall.  They had come running to the place, marshalling the alguacils and the patrols, to face and quell the mutiny.

“What do you want?” the Mayor asked the crowd.

What did they want!  They wanted the one remedy, the one salvation, for the city:  they wanted to take the omnipotent saint to the bank of the river that he might awe it with his presence, just as their ancestors had been doing for centuries and centuries, and thanks to which the city was still standing!

Some of the city people, whom the peasants regarded as atheists, began to smile at the strange request.  Wouldn’t it be better to spend the time getting all the valuables out of the houses on the bank?  A tempest of protests followed this proposal.  “Out with the saint!  Out with San Bernat! We want the miracle!  The miracle!” Those simple people were thinking of the wonders they had learned in their childhood at their mothers’ knees; times in former centuries, when it had been enough for San Bernardo to appear on a river road, to start the flood down again, draining off from the orchard lands as water leaks from a broken pitcher.