In his wanderings about the church he would often stop before the immense fresco of Saint Christopher, a picture as bad as it was huge--a figure occupying all one division of the wall from the pavement to the cornice, and which by its size seemed to be the only fitting inhabitant of the church.

The cadets would come in the evenings to look at it; that colossus of pink flesh, bearing the child on its shoulders, advancing its angular legs carefully through the waters, leaning on a palm tree that looked like a broom, was for them by far the most noticeable thing in the church.

The light-hearted young men delighted in measuring its ankles with their swords and afterwards calculating how many swords high the blessed giant could be.

It was the readiest application that they could make of those mathematical calculations with which they were so much worried in the academy.

The apprentice of the church was irritated at the impudence with which these dressed up popinjays, the apprentices of war, sauntered about the church.
Many mornings he would go to the Muzarabe Chapel, following attentively the ancient ritual,[1] intoned by the priests especially devoted to it.