Father Jose hesitated.  The temptation was great, and the prospect of acquiring some knowledge of the Great Enemy’s plans not the least trifling object.  And if the truth must be told, there was a certain decorum about the stranger that interested the Padre.  Though well aware of the Protean shapes the Arch-Fiend could assume, and though free from the weaknesses of the flesh, Father Jose was not above the temptations of the spirit.  Had the Devil appeared, as in the case of the pious St. Anthony, in the likeness of a comely damsel, the good Father, with his certain experience of the deceitful sex, would have whisked her away in the saying of a paternoster.  But there was, added to the security of age, a grave sadness about the stranger,—­a thoughtful consciousness as of being at a great moral disadvantage,—­which at once decided him on a magnanimous course of conduct.

The stranger then proceeded to inform him, that he had been diligently observing the Holy Father’s triumphs in the valley.  That, far from being greatly exercised thereat, he had been only grieved to see so enthusiastic and chivalrous an antagonist wasting his zeal in a hopeless work.  For, he observed, the issue of the great battle of Good and Evil had been otherwise settled, as he would presently show him.  “It wants but a few moments of night,” he continued, “and over this interval of twilight, as you know, I have been given complete control.  Look to the West.”

As the Padre turned, the stranger took his enormous hat from his head, and waved it three times before him.  At each sweep of the prodigious feather, the fog grew thinner, until it melted impalpably away, and the former landscape returned, yet warm with the glowing sun.  As Father Jose gazed, a strain of martial music arose from the valley, and, issuing from a deep canon, the good Father beheld a long cavalcade of gallant cavaliers, habited like his companion.  As they swept down the plain, they were joined by like processions, that slowly defiled from every ravine and canon of the mysterious mountain.  From time to time the peal of a trumpet swelled fitfully upon the breeze; the cross of Santiago glittered, and the royal banners of Castile and Aragon waved over the moving column.  So they moved on solemnly toward the sea, where, in the distance, Father Jose saw stately caravels, bearing the same familiar banner, awaiting them.  The good Padre gazed with conflicting emotions, and the serious voice of the stranger broke the silence.

“Thou hast beheld, Sir Priest, the fading footprints of adventurous Castile.  Thou hast seen the declining glory of old Spain,—­declining as yonder brilliant sun.  The sceptre she hath wrested from the heathen is fast dropping from her decrepit and fleshless grasp.  The children she hath fostered shall know her no longer.  The soil she hath acquired shall be lost to her as irrevocably as she herself hath thrust the Moor from her own Granada.”