26 A SAINT'S BIOGRAPHY 



weighed the wool and paid the shearers every day, 

 men and women, for we had them of both sexes; 

 only a woman never got beyond her fifty per day, 

 while some men would soar to a hundred, and 

 even twenty more. And so we went on for about 

 three weeks, until some thirty-five to forty thousand 

 animals had been deprived of their fleeces. The siestas 

 or lazy intervals in the day, and the evenings, were 

 tedious in that hot, dusty, woolly place, and I asked 

 my host one day if he had not such a thing as a book 

 in his house. Oh yes, he joyfully and proudly replied, 

 he had a book, one book, but a good one, a big one; 

 and dashing off to another room he soon appeared 

 with the one book — a huge old folio bound in thick 

 leather, almost black with age. It was a life, in 

 Spanish, of the Italian saint, John Gualberto, a great 

 and holy man, as such things were accounted in the 

 eleventh century, or as we might describe him from 

 a twentieth-century point of view, a dull-witted, 

 insanely superstitious, enraged bull in a religious 

 china shop. A poem or romance would have suited 

 me better, or at all events a book one could hold in 

 one's hand when lying on a couch ; but it was the one 

 and only book in the house, and I had to read sitting 

 at a table; and in this uncomfortable way, reading 

 a few chapters at a sitting, I got through the whole 

 of it — the dullest book I ever waded through, about 

 the most detestable character one could stumble 

 upon even in the histories of the saints. 



After the blessed Gualberto's death, I read, there 

 was a statue or monument of him erected in some 



