Refreshed and strengthened he turned inland and pushed up-stream until he reached a point to which the salt water never rose. There, in a cold cascade, he washed his under-garments; and while they were drying in the sun he sat under an evergreen oak, wrapped in his coarse habit, and began to recite the Divine Office. Although he had perforce left behind at Navares the bundle which contained three volumes of his breviary, he had brought away in his hand the _Pars Æstiva_, from which he had said the last Compline with his brethren; and, by the time his clothes were dry, he had recited the whole of Matins, Lauds, and Prime. Having dressed himself Antonio sat down to mature his plans. He decided, first of all, to forswear false pride. Excepting one volume of a breviary and the poor clothes he sat in he was without a possession in the world. It was true that he owned a pair of brawny arms, and he was willing and eager to use them hard from morning to night: but he felt that the prime necessity was to exchange his habit for a layman's dress. It was not fitting that a monk of Saint Benedict should wander about like a mendicant friar. Accordingly, Antonio resolved to enter the village and to seek aid, for the first and last time, from the secular clergy. He waded the stream above the cascade and descended the northern bank until he reached a lane roughly paved with boulders. The lane wound in and out between low walls: but it led at last to the foot of a mound on which rose a vast oblong church with lime-washed walls and granite quoins. The sacristan, in a very short and skimpy scarlet gown, was in the act of unlocking the doors; and, through his offices, Antonio soon found himself in the ample presence of the _padre-cura_. The _padre-cura_ received his visitor with uncertain approval. He was a hard-headed old man, whose counsels were less eagerly sought by his flock in the confession than in difficult cases of calving, or boat-caulking, or bush-vine pruning. He believed every article of the longest and latest of the creeds implicitly, and lived becomingly: but there was not a tinge of the mystic in his personality. The sight of a monk slightly nettled him. This secular priest felt that a religious must be contemptuous of his common-sense, every-day Christianity, and that he must be tacitly challenging him to a superfine and unpractical piety. Besides, the cura's friends were Liberals, and they had quieted his qualms concerning the new laws against the monasteries by assuring him, as they assured so many others of his class, that the swollen revenues of the suppressed houses would go to augment the wretched stipends of the rural clergy. Antonio began to explain whence he had come. But the sacristan was already tugging away at the bell-rope, and the cura interrupted. "You are not a lay-brother?" he demanded. "You are a priest?" "I am a priest," answered Antonio.