They could not see quietly what was happening--'child's play,' 'follies.'" But nevertheless such follies made them smile with paternal satisfaction.
He thought to be himself among those who fled, as the world seemed to be coming to an end.

In certain towns the revolutionary mob had invaded and profaned the churches; as yet they had not murdered any of the ministers of God as in other revolutions, but still the priests were unable to go about the streets in their cassocks for fear of being hooted and insulted.

The remembrance of the archbishops of Toledo, those brave ecclesiastical princes, implacable warriors against the infidels, fired his warlike feelings.

As yet he had never been away from Toledo, away from the shadow of its Cathedral; Spain seemed to him as vast as all the rest of the world put together, and he began to feel the ardent desire of seeing something new, of seeing closer all the wonderful things he had read about in his books, stirring within him.
One day he kissed his mother's hand, without feeling any very great emotion towards the trembling and nearly blind old woman, for the seminary had for him more tender memories than the house of his fathers, smoked his last cigar with his brothers in the garden without revealing his intentions to them, and that night he fled from Toledo with a scapulary of the Heart of Jesus sewed into his waistcoat, and a beautiful silk scarf in his wallet, one of those worked by white hands in the convents of the city.

The son of the bell-ringer went with him.