“Ah, monsieur,” said Florian, shaking his head, “I am afraid you do not speak of quite the barrel which is in your legend.” “So I have a legend! Why, how delightful! But come,” said the saint, abeam with honest pleasure, and with his halo twinkling merrily, “come, be communicative; be copious, and tell me all about myself.” Then Florian told Hoprig of how, after Hoprig’s supposed death, miracles had been worked at Hoprig’s putative tomb, near Gol, and this legend and that legend had grown up around his memory, and how these things had led to Hoprig’s being canonized. And Florian alluded also, with perfect tact but a little ruefully, to those fine donations he had been giving, year in and year out, to the Church of Holy Hoprig, under the impression that all the while the saint had been, instead of snoring at Brunbelois, looking out for Florian’s interests in heaven. And Hoprig now seemed rather pensive, and he inquired particularly about his tomb. “I shall take this,” the saint said, at last, “to be the fit reward of my tender-heartedness. The tomb near Gol of which you tell me is the tomb in which I buried that Horrig about whom I was just talking, after we had settled our difference of opinion as to some points of theology. Ork was so widely scattered that any formal interment was quite out of the question. My priests are dear, well-meaning fellows. Still, you conceive, they are conscientious, and they enter with such zeal into the performance of any manifest if painful duty—” Florian said: “They exhibited the archetypal zeal becoming to the ministers of an established church in the defence of their vested rights. They were, with primitive inadequacy, groping toward the methods of our Holy Inquisition and of civilized prelates everywhere—” “—So they were quite tired out when we passed on to Horrig’s case. I do not deny that I was perhaps unduly lenient about Horrig. It was the general opinion that, tired as we were, this blasphemer against the religious principles of our fathers ought to be burned at the stake, and have his ashes scattered to the winds. But I was merciful. I had eaten an extremely light breakfast. So I merely had him broken on the wheel and decapitated, and we got through our morning’s work, after all, in good time for dinner: and I gave him a very nice tomb indeed, with his name on it in capital letters. Dear me!” observed Holy Hoprig, with a marked increase of his benevolent smile, “but how drolly things fall out! If the name had not been in capital letters, now, I would probably never have been wearing this halo which surprised me so this morning when I went to brush my hair—” “But what has happened?” said the Queen.