Iñigo lay in the stout square castle of rugged stone, which is now reverently enclosed, like a jewel, in a vast home of the Jesuits. It then stood alone in a beautiful valley, just at the foot of the last southern slopes of the Pyrenees, about a mile from the little town of Azpeitia. The mind of the young Basque heaved with confused and feverish dreams as he lay there, in the summer heat, beside the wreck of his ambition. He called for books of knight-errantry, to while away the dreary days, but there were none in the Loyola castle, and someone--a pious sister, perhaps--brought him a _Life of Christ_ and a _Flowers of the Saints_. For lack of anything better he read them: at first fingering the leaves with the nearest approach to disdain that a Christian soldier dare admit, then starting with interest, at length flushing with enthusiasm. What was this but another form of chivalry? Nay, when you reflected, it was the only chivalry worth so fierce a devotion as his. Here was a way of winning a fair lady, the Queen of Heaven, whose glances were worth more than the caresses of all the dames in Castile: here was a monarch to serve, whose court outshone the courts of France and Spain as the sun outshines the stars: here were adventures that called for a higher spirit than the bravado of the soldier. The young Basque began to look upon a new world from the narrow windows of the old castle. Down the valley was Azpeitia, and even there one could find monsters and evil knights to slay in the cause of Mary. Southward were the broad provinces of Spain, full of half-converted Moors and Jews and ever-flourishing vices. Across the hills and the seas were other kingdoms, calling just as loudly for a new champion of God and Mary. One field, far away at the edge of the world, summoned him with peremptory voice; after all the Crusades the sites in the Holy Land were still trodden by the feet of blaspheming Turks. The blood began to course once more in the veins of the soldier.