were all a matter of course for these brown-skinned boys and girls to have acquired so singular an accomplishment in their out-of-the-way village among the mountains. As for us we looked on in open-mouthed astonishment; and when, in the middle of the quadrille, the harp and violin struck up no less a tune than “The King of the Cannibal Islands,” we could hardly help bursting out into fits of laughter. We restrained ourselves, however, and kept as grave a countenance as the rest of the lookers-on, who had not the faintest idea that anything odd was happening. The quadrille finished in perfect order; each dancer took his partner by the hand and led her forward; and so, forming a line in front of the high altar, they all knelt down, and the rest of the congregation followed their example; there was a dead silence in the church for about the space of an Ave Maria, then everyone rose, and the ceremony was over.2
Our young monk asked permission of his superior to take us out for a walk, and we went down together to the convent-mill. There we saw the mill, which was primitive, and the miller, who was burly; and also something much more worth seeing, at least to our young acquaintance, who tucked up his skirts and ran briskly up a ladder into the upper regions, calling to us to follow him. A door led from the granary into the miller’s house, and the miller’s daughter happened, of course entirely by chance, to be coming through that way. A very pretty girl she was too, and I never in my life saw anything more intensely comic than the looks of intelligence that passed between her and the young friar when he presented us. It was decidedly contrary to good monastic discipline it is true, and we ought to have been shocked, but it was so intolerably laughable that my companion bolted into the granary to examine the wheat, and I took refuge in a violent fit of coughing. Our nerves had been already rudely shaken by the King of the Cannibal Islands, and this little scene of convent-life fairly finished us.
We asked our young friend what his day’s work consisted of, and how he liked convent-life. He yawned, and intimated that it was very slow. We