I Instantly
Resolved To Take Advantage Of This Overture On The Part Of Count
Ofalia, And To Call On Him Myself.
I therefore caused a copy of
the Gospel to be handsomely bound, and proceeding to the palace,
was instantly admitted to him.
He was a dusky, diminutive person,
between fifty and sixty years of age, with false hair and teeth,
but exceedingly gentlemanly manners. He received me with great
affability, and thanked me for my present; but on my proceeding to
speak of the New Testament, he told me that the subject was
surrounded with difficulties, and that the great body of the clergy
had taken up the matter against me; he conjured me, however, to be
patient and peaceable, in which case he said he would endeavour to
devise some plan to satisfy me. Amongst other things, he observed
that the bishops hated a sectarian more than an Atheist. Whereupon
I replied, that, like the Pharisees of old, they cared more for the
gold of the temple than the temple itself. Throughout the whole of
our interview he evidently laboured under great fear, and was
continually looking behind and around him, seemingly in dread of
being overheard, which brought to my mind an expression of a friend
of mine, that if there be any truth in metempsychosis, the soul of
Count Ofalia must have originally belonged to a mouse. We parted
in kindness, and I went away, wondering by what strange chance this
poor man had become prime minister of a country like Spain.
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