Fra Pacifico was a dark, burly man, with a large, weather-beaten face, kind gray eyes under a pair of shaggy eyebrows, a resolute nose, large, full-lipped mouth, and a clean-shaven double chin, that rested comfortably upon his priestly stock.  He was no longer young, but he had a frame like iron, and in his time he had possessed a force of arm and muscle enough to fell an ox.  His strength and daring were acknowledged by all the mountain-folks from Corellia to Barga, hardy fellows, and judges of what a man can do.  Moreover, Fra Pacifico was more than six feet high—­and who does not respect a man of such inches?  In fair fight he had killed his man—­a brigand chief—­who prowled about the mountains toward Carrara.  His band had fled and never returned.

Fra Pacifico had stood with his strong feet planted on the earth, over the edge of a rocky precipice—­by which the high-road passed—­and seized a furious horse dragging a cart holding six poor souls below.  Fra Pacifico had found a shepherd of Corellia—­one of his flock—­struck down by fever on a rocky peak some twenty miles distant, and he had carried him on his back, and laid him on his bed at home.  Every one had some story to tell of his prowess, coolness, and manly daring.  When he walked along the streets, the ragged children—­as black with sun and dirt as unfledged ravens—­sidled up to him, and, looking up into his gray eyes, ran between his firm-set legs, plucked him by the cassock, and felt in his pockets for an apple or a cake.  Then the children held him tight until he had raised them up and kissed them.

Spite of the labors of the previous night (no one had worked harder), Fra Pacifico had risen with daybreak.  His office accustomed him to little sleep.  There was no time by day or night that he could call his own.  If any one was stricken with sickness in the night, or suddenly seized for death in those pale hours when the day hovers, half-born, over the slumbering earth, Fra Pacifico must rise and wake his acolyte, the baker’s boy, who, going late to bed, was hard to rouse.  Along with him he must grope up and down slippery steps, and along dark alleys, bearing the Host under a red umbrella, until he had placed it within the dying lips.  If a baby was weakly, or born before its time, and, having given one look at this sorrowful world, was about to lose its eyes on it forever, Fra Pacifico must run out at any moment to christen it.

There was no doctor at Corellia, the people were too poor; so Fra Pacifico was called upon to do a doctor’s duty.  He must draw the teeth of such as needed it; bind up cuts and sores; set limbs; and give such simple drugs as he knew the nature of.  He must draw up papers for those who could not afford to pay the notary; write letters for those who could only make a cross; hear and conceal every secret that reached him in the confessional or on the death-bed.  He must be at hand at any hour in the twenty-four—­ready to counsel, soothe, command, and reprimand; to bless, to curse, and, if need be, to strike, when his righteous anger rose; to fetch and carry for all, and, poor himself, to give out of his scanty store.  These were his priestly duties.