“You will see that the story can only be touched here and there.
“Everything succeeded, because all were in sympathy with their leader, and his prosperity was their prosperity. These men and women who had found themselves here, perhaps, for the first time in their lives, treated with respect, had no desire to withdraw the veil so mercifully let down between their human present and their infernal past. They were faithful from self-interest and from a passionate sense of gratitude.
“Now and then a new-comer was hard to assimilate; but indulgence was shown. A mind long embittered may almost outgrow the possibility of peace, not from any deformity of character, but from a profound sense of injustice. A man or woman of middle age who can remember no happy childhood, no aspiration of enthusiastic youth which was not crushed by disappointment and mortification, has amassed a sense of wrong which help comes too late then to cancel.
“Dylar’s conviction, which still holds with us, was that a person so unfortunate as to have become an outcast from civilization is most probably the victim of some atrocious wrong in his birth, or in his early training, or that some supreme injustice has been done him later in life. Enlightened by his own experience and by subsequent observation, he perceived a wide and cruel barbarism hidden beneath the fair semblance of what calls itself civilization. Christianity he recognized as the only true civilizer; but Christianity was an individual, not a social fact. There was no Christian society.
“As time passed, some persons of a different character, though all needy, began to be drawn into the Olives,—a mourner who desired to spend the remnant of a blighted life in retirement, or a hopeless invalid, or some student whose life was consecrated to study and starvation. He was astonished to find how many accomplished people in the world were poor.
“He was, therefore, in no want of teachers. Some remained for a time; some never left him. To the latter only the existence of San Salvador was known.
“In the lifetime of the first Dylar the necessity for preparing for outside colonies was already felt, and his successor began them. He made large investments, and had agents. All young orphans were sent out, and all beyond a certain number in families. Sometimes a whole family will go. Their relatives are their hostages.
“It was the third Dylar, called Basil, who built the Basilica. There had been only a shrine for a throne of acacia wood. This throne Basil made with his own hands. It was he also who planned and began the cemetery; and he was the first one to be laid in it.
“Basil went out young into the world. He made himself first a carpenter, then studied architecture and mining. He never married. I am descended from his brother.
“Volumes might be filled with beautiful stories that were told of him, and with legends, half true, half false, which the people wove about him. His sudden appearances and disappearances at the castle after he returned to San Salvador were held by some to be miraculous. He lived a hundred years, and was found dead on the summit of the mountain of the cemetery. There is a grassy hollow at the top that is called ‘Basil’s Rest.’