“Who is there?”
“Your brother, who wants to be let in.” And the end of the story is that friar Pedro is sent off with a flea in his ear, the nuns thrashing him with sticks, and he disappears grumbling.
At this the twins would still laugh with glee at an age when most children begin to crave for better playthings than their own fingers; but, as they grew up, their games lost their primitive simplicity and their reading and their characters became more serious. Luis Gonzaga was the delight of his seniors from his quiet good sense and his incapacity for getting into mischief; the only fault to be found with him was his love of solitary wanderings among the rocks, breathing the keen and bracing air that perpetually fans our granite ramparts, which look like the ruins of some cyclopean fortress, or the broken teeth of a giant’s jaws from which the flesh has long since disappeared. He delighted in being alone, and his chief ambition was to be a goat-herd and follow the kids that spring from peak to peak in that dead and dessicated arcadia; he heeded neither cold nor heat.
One day he was discovered lying at the foot of a pine-tree, the solitary specimen of vegetable life within sight, that stood melancholy, senile and leafless, as though in dismal warning, like the motto on a tombstone: “we all must die.” The boy was writing “something” on a scrap of paper with a black lead pencil which he frequently moistened by putting in his mouth. It was the priest who found him, and who took possession of the manuscript, which consisted of a number of lines without rhyme or rhythm, devoid alike of grammar and spelling, which made the worthy man laugh heartily—for he knew something, if not much, of the humanities.
“This is neither verse nor prose,” he said.
No, it was neither verse nor prose; but it was poetry. These were stanzas on the model of verses from the Bible expressing the feelings of a contemplative nature. How the priest laughed as he read:
“When the darkness of night falls, the flocks of Heaven are scattered over the vast blue field and watched over by the gentle angels.—
“The Lord passed by yesterday in a chariot of thunder drawn by lightning which cast down hail and sweated rain; I trembled like a flame in the wind and my mind was tossed like a pebble carried away by a flood.
“I am like dried flax that catches fire, and turning to smoke, rises from the ashes and ascends to Heaven.”
One day their grandmother rose much later than usual, her face was flushed, her speech slow and strange, while her eyes glistened like two old metal buttons that have been rubbed very bright. All the servants observed to their great consternation that their mistress talked a great deal of nonsense—not that this in itself was an alarming novelty—but she repeated the same thing again and again, without any interval of better sense. When the priest felt her pulse, the good lady grasped his arm and throwing a cloak over her shoulders exclaimed with a wild laugh: