Whoever is interested in her saintly
career may purchase at Nepenthe, for the small sum of sixpence, an
admirable biography by a young Canon of the Church, Don Giacinto
Mellino. It gives a full account of her life and of those nine hundred
and seventy-two miracles of hers which have been authenticated by
eye-witnesses. No need, therefore, to expatiate further.
It stands to reason that Mr. Eames possessed a copy of this treatise.
An ideal annotator, he rarely indulged in speculation; his business was
to discover and co-ordinate references. Nevertheless, in regard to the
earthly life of this particular saint, he used to say: "There are some
things a man cannot help puzzling about." It irked him--her success on
Nepenthe. He knew the sailormen to be a horny-handed, skeptical,
worldly brood. Why had they imported the cult of Eulalia from Spain;
why had they chosen for their patroness a mawkish suffering nonentity,
so different from those sunny goddesses of classical days? He
concluded, lamely, that there was an element of the child in every
Southerner; that men, refusing to believe what is improbable, reserve
their credulity for what is utterly impossible; in brief, that the
prosaic sea-folk of Nepenthe were like everybody else in possessing a
grain of stupidity in their composition--"which does not bring us much
further," he would add.
Pages:
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702