brown-skinned boys and girls to have acquired so singular an accomplishment in their out-of-the-way village among the mountains.  As for us we looked on in open-mouthed astonishment; and when, in the middle of the quadrille, the harp and violin struck up no less a tune than “The King of the Cannibal Islands,” we could hardly help bursting out into fits of laughter.  We restrained ourselves, however, and kept as grave a countenance as the rest of the lookers-on, who had not the faintest idea that anything odd was happening.  The quadrille finished in perfect order; each dancer took his partner by the hand and led her forward; and so, forming a line in front of the high altar, they all knelt down, and the rest of the congregation followed their example; there was a dead silence in the church for about the space of an Ave Maria, then everyone rose, and the ceremony was over.[17]

Our young monk asked permission of his superior to take us out for a walk, and we went down together to the convent-mill.  There we saw the mill, which was primitive, and the miller, who was burly; and also something much more worth seeing, at least to our young acquaintance, who tucked up his skirts and ran briskly up a ladder into the upper regions, calling to us to follow him.  A door led from the granary into the miller’s house, and the miller’s daughter happened, of course entirely by chance, to be coming through that way.  A very pretty girl she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic than the looks of intelligence that passed between her and the young friar when he presented us.  It was decidedly contrary to good monastic discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so intolerably laughable that my companion bolted into the granary to examine the wheat, and I took refuge in a violent fit of coughing.  Our nerves had been already rudely shaken by the King of the Cannibal Islands, and this little scene of convent-life fairly finished us.

We asked our young friend what his day’s work consisted of, and how he liked convent-life.  He yawned, and intimated that it was very slow.  We enquired whether the monks had not some parochial duties to perform, such as visiting the sick and the poor in their neighbourhood.  He evidently wondered whether we were really ignorant, or whether we were “chaffing” him, and observed that that was no business of their’s, the curas of the villages did all that sort of thing.  “Then, what have you to do?” we said.  “Well,” he said, “there are so many services every day, and high mass on Sundays and holidays; and besides that, there’s—­well, there isn’t anything particular.  It’s rather a dull life.  I myself should like uncommonly to go and travel and see the world, or go and fight somewhere.”  We were quite sorry for the young fellow when we shook hands with him at parting, and he left us to go back to his convent.

We had been clambering about the hill, seeing the caves with which it is honeycombed, but at present they were uninhabited.  At the time of the great festival, when they are full of Indian families, the scene must be a curious one.