Saint Eulalia appeared too late to find her proper niche in Monsignor Perrelli’s antiquities or to be commemorated in some worthy architectural monument by the Good Duke Alfred; too late—­and this is doubtless a lucky circumstance—­to become the victim of one of Father Capocchio’s offensive sneers.  Whoever is interested in her saintly career may purchase at Nepenthe, for the small sum of sixpence, an admirable biography by a young Canon of the Church, Don Giacinto Mellino.  It gives a full account of her life and of those nine hundred and seventy-two miracles of hers which have been authenticated by eye-witnesses.  No need, therefore, to expatiate further.

It stands to reason that Mr. Eames possessed a copy of this treatise.  An ideal annotator, he rarely indulged in speculation; his business was to discover and co-ordinate references.  Nevertheless, in regard to the earthly life of this particular saint, he used to say:  “There are some things a man cannot help puzzling about.”  It irked him—­her success on Nepenthe.  He knew the sailormen to be a horny-handed, skeptical, worldly brood.  Why had they imported the cult of Eulalia from Spain; why had they chosen for their patroness a mawkish suffering nonentity, so different from those sunny goddesses of classical days?  He concluded, lamely, that there was an element of the child in every Southerner; that men, refusing to believe what is improbable, reserve their credulity for what is utterly impossible; in brief, that the prosaic sea-folk of Nepenthe were like everybody else in possessing a grain of stupidity in their composition—­“which does not bring us much further,” he would add. . . .

At the time of this year’s festival Mr. Eames was supremely happy.  Another pamphlet had come into his hands, an anonymous pamphlet making fun of the Duchess whose reception into the Roman Church had been fixed for the day of Saint Eulalia’s festival.  It bore the objectionable title the dipping of the duchess and had presumably been indited by some wag at the Alpha and Omega Club who disapproved of water in every shape, even for baptismal purposes.  The stuff was printed on the sly and hastily circulated about the island—­some people maintained that Mr. Richards, the respectable Vice-President of that institution, was its author.  It was a scurrilous anti-Catholic leaflet, grossly personal and savouring of atheism.  The Duchess, on hearing of it—­everything got about on Nepenthe—­was so distressed that she decided to cancel, or at least postpone, the ceremony of her public conversion.  At a meeting of urgency convened by the priests, who were bitterly disappointed at her attitude, it was agreed that this was no time for half-measures.  A round sum of money was voted wherewith to buy back the pernicious pamphlet from its respective owners with a view to its destruction.