As in the cells and corridors of the great abbey, so in the low rooms of the little farm-house the Portuguese sun had counteracted the Portuguese rains, and the place was clean and dry. Some bulky chests, two heavy tables, a dresser, and two wooden bedsteads had been left behind, for the simple reason that the original cabinet-maker had constructed them inside the house, and there was no door or window wide enough for their egress. Antonio noted with satisfaction that two or three pounds would buy all he required in the way of linen, chairs, crockery, and household utensils. Through want of irrigation the oranges on the trees were small, sour, and hard. Antonio, however, was much more interested in the vines. To an untrained eye they would have seemed a hopeless intertanglement of decaying leaves, with sparse bunches of withered currants hiding here and there: but Antonio quickly saw that skill and hard labor would reclaim them. Better still, he found a three-acre patch of light arable land which almost realized his ideal site for an entirely new vineyard of bush-vines. The wine-press, in one of the outbuildings, had seen better days: but this did not worry Antonio, as he was determined, in any case, to import a new wine-making plant from Bordeaux. Next morning the young farmer was early in the saddle on his way to Villa Branca, ten leagues to the east. He had learned at Navares that Villa Branca was the seat of a puissant official representing the Fazenda, or Portuguese Exchequer, and that the suppressed abbeys and monasteries of the district were administered by this exalted personage. He cantered into Villa Branca with a clear proposal to make. Would the Fazenda accept an annual rent of fifty pounds for the abbey lands, at the same time giving Antonio the option of buying the whole property, at the end of ten years, for two thousand pounds? If so he, Antonio, would engage to cultivate the lands and to keep the buildings in repair. Although his ride was ten leagues long, the monk reached the local offices of the Fazenda nearly an hour earlier than the official, who lived a hundred yards away. The waiting-room was more than half filled with high stacks of books, most of them in old calf bindings. A glance showed that these were the spoils of monastic libraries, dumped down anyhow in the Fazenda building until somebody from Lisbon should arrive to divide them between the national and municipal libraries. Antonio picked up a volume at random. It was a sequence of Lenten meditations in French; and the hand of some long dead Augustinian had filled the fly-leaves with pious annotations. Antonio was poring over this crabbed and faded script when the Personage entered the room.