cathedral, who may be seen at any hour kneeling in the dim light of
flickering candles before the altar rails.

Mon's apartment, indeed, in the tall house next door to the Posada de los
Reyes on the Paseo del Ebro was a known resort of the more cultured of
the pilgrims, of these who came from afar; from Rome and from the
farthest limits of the Roman Church--from Warsaw to Minnesota.

Evasio Mon had friends also among the humble and such as sheltered in the
Posada de los Reyes, which itself was a typical Spanish hostelry, and one
of those houses of the road in which the traveler is lucky if he finds
the bedrooms all occupied; for then he may, without giving offense, sleep
more comfortably in the hayloft. Here, night and day, the clink of bells
and the gruff admonition of refractory mules told of travel, and the
constant come and go of strange, wild-looking men from the remoter
corners of Aragon, far up by the foothills of the Pyrenees. The huge
two-wheeled carts drawn by six, eight or ten mules, came lumbering
through the dust at all hours of the twenty-four, bringing the produce of
the greener lands to this oasis of the Aragonese desert. Some came from
other oases in the salt and stony plains where once an inland sea covered
all, while the others hailed from the north where the Sierras de Guara
rise merging into the giant Pyrenees.

Many of these drivers made their way up the stairs of the house where
Evasio Mon lived his quiet life, and gave a letter or merely a verbal
message, remembered faithfully through the long and dusty journey, to the
man who, though no priest himself, seemed known to every priest in Spain.
These letters and messages were nearly always from the curate of some
distant village, and told as often as not of a cheerful hopefulness in
the work.