While Maura was in office nothing about priests and firearms would have been allowed to appear in the papers, but about a fortnight after his fall the _Pais_ asserted that previous to the Barcelona outbreak the Carlists and Jesuits had accumulated a great quantity of arms in some of the small towns in Cataluña, which were subsequently conveyed at night from one religious house to another in Barcelona. And, said the _Pais_, while the local authorities were imprisoning luckless working men who neither possessed weapons nor made any sort of revolutionary movement, the contraband purchase of arms was still going on, “the priests and the Religious Orders shamelessly lending their aid to it, and the people keeping silence because they believe that every Government, whatever it may be called, is either friendly to Carlism or is afraid of it and cannot or will not interfere with it.” On reading this article (which the Ultramontane organs did not contradict) I was reminded of a story which had been told me three months before by one of my working class friends. A pious old woman, the wife of a small shopkeeper in a town where there are many religious houses, went one night to a service at a church attached to a monastery.[15] The weather was hot and the old woman tired. She fell sound asleep in a dark corner and woke at midnight to find the church empty and the doors locked. Recognising at once that she had no choice but to stay where she was until morning, she was looking about for the most comfortable bench on which to pass the night, when she saw a light in the sacristy communicating with the monastery and heard steps approaching. Fearing lest the fathers should accuse her of being there with intent to rob the church, she crawled under a bench and lay trembling. From this position she saw a number of monks and priests file into the nave, form up in ranks, and go through various military exercises under the command of one of the number, who looked and spoke like an officer. The drill continued for some time, and after it was over the unwilling witness had to stay where she was until the doors were opened for early Mass, when she made her escape, ran home as fast as her poor old legs would carry her, and related what she had seen to her husband and neighbours. This was told me by a lad who sold fruit to the husband, who declared that he had heard it from the old woman herself.