“May God and our Lady recompense thy zeal and piety!” was the prior’s benign reply. He then proceeded, with equal affability and good sense, to discuss the details of the lengthened journey which it would be necessary for Fray Fernando to undertake. The younger monk seemed not only willing, but actually eager to occupy the post assigned to him. Not during his whole novitiate (which had but recently terminated) had he appeared so cheerful, not to say so animated. It was currently reported that nothing gave Fray Fernando pleasure except self-mortifications and austerities; which he carried to a greater length than any monk who had been in the monastery since its foundation. “I have found the very man for your excellency’s affair,” wrote the prior that evening to Don Marcio. “He is a brother of our house; exceeding pious; and so consumed with zeal for the Faith, that he desires nothing so much as martyrdom. The more difficult and painful an enterprise, the less of worldly honour or profit it is like to bring, the more attractions it hath in the eyes of our holy Fray Fernando.” Such were the reflections of good Fray Tomas de San Martin; who was as much, and as little, able to penetrate the mystery that veils every human soul as any other shrewd man who fondly imagines that he can read the hearts of his neighbours at a glance. II. Cerro Blanco. “I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, Who feed, and hoard, and sleep, and know not me.” TENNYSON. Fray Fernando has been nearly a year in his new home. But it seems a mockery to call it by that sacred name: since not to any living thing was Cerro Blanco a home in the true sense of the word. Yet between forty and fifty miners, with their families, ate, drank, and slept in the cluster of cabins that nestled, almost literally, in a cleft of the rock, for protection against the stormy winds of the Andes. These cabins were built of adobes, or mud-bricks dried in the sun; and were thatched, very neatly and carefully, with the strong grass called _ychu_. All this work had been done, before the arrival of the negroes, by the Indians of the valley, as part of the labour required from them by way of tribute to their lord. They were also obliged to provide the little colony with the necessaries of life. At stated intervals they might be seen treading the steep and winding mountain-paths in long procession, bearing on their heads or their shoulders large baskets of maize, of potatoes, or of quinoa—the rice of the country—as food for the negroes. Nor would they fail to bring also a couple of alpacas, and a good supply of chica, or native beer, to suit the more luxurious tastes of the Spanish intendant of the mine, and his servants. For in that elevated situation few things would grow (at least, without very careful cultivation), except stunted grass and little mountain-flowers, mostly blue and yellow.