“They have offshoots:  of which I knew but one in Italy, that settled some fifty years back in a monastery they call Buon-Solazzo, outside Florence, at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.  But I have been making question of our guests through Dom Basilio, their guest-master and abbot de facto (since their late abbot, an old man whom he calls Dom Polifilo, died of exposure on the mountains some three days before they embarked); and it appears that they belong to a second colony, which has made its home for these ten years at Casalabriva in Corsica, having arrived by invitation of the Queen Emilia of that island, and there abiding until the Genoese burned the roof over their heads.”

The Vicar sipped his wine.

“You have considered,” he asked, “the peril of introducing so many papists into our quiet parish?”

“I have not considered it for a moment,” answered my father, cheerfully.  “Nor have I introduced them.  But if you fear they’ll convert—­pervert—­subvert—­invert your parishioners and turn ’em into papists, I can reassure you.  For in the first place thirty men, or thirty thousand, of whom only one can open his mouth, are, for proselytizing, equal to one man and no more.”

“They can teach by their example if not by their precept,” urged the Vicar.

“Their example is to sleep in their coffins.  My good sir, if you will not trust your English doctrine to its own truth, you might at least rely on the persuasiveness of its comforts.  Nay, pardon me, my friend,” he went on, as the Vicar’s either cheekbone showed a red flush, “I did not mean to speak offensively; but, Englishman though I am, in matters of religion my countrymen are ever a puzzle to me.  At a great price you won your freedom from the Bishop of Rome and his dictation.  I admire the price and I love liberty; yet liberty has its drawbacks, as you have for a long while been discovering; of which the first is that every man with a maggot in his head can claim a like liberty with yourselves, quoting your own words in support of it.  Let me remind you of that passage in which Rabelais—­borrowing, I believe, from Lucian—­brings the good Pantagruel and his fellow-voyagers to a port which he calls the Port of Lanterns.  ’There (says he) upon a tall tower Pantagruel recognized the Lantern of La Rochelle, which gave us an excellent clear light.  Also we saw the Lanterns of Pharos, of Nauplia, and of the Acropolis of Athens, sacred to Pallas,’ and so on; whence I draw the moral that coast-lights are good, yet, multiplied, they complicate navigation.”

“And apply your moral by erecting yet another!”

“Fairly retorted.  Yet how can you object without turning the sword of Liberty against herself?  Have you never heard tell, by the way, of Captain Byng’s midshipman?”

“Who was he?”

“I forget his name, but he started his first night aboard ship by kneeling down and saying his prayers, as his mother had taught him.”