It was Father Devine, who was a bit of an antiquarian, who looked up the details of the life of St Mulpeter for him. There were a lot of these, mostly contradictory and all queer. It seemed that, like most of the saints of that remote period, St Mulpeter had put to sea on a flagstone and floated ashore in Cornwall. There, the seven harpers of the King had just been put to death through the curses of the Druids and the machinations of the King’s bad wife. St Mulpeter miraculously brought them all back to life, and, through the great mercy of God, they were permitted to sing a song about the Queen’s behaviour, which resulted in St Mulpeter’s turning her into a pillarstone and converting the King to the one true faith. The Bishop had once been Professor of Dogmatic Theology in a seminary; a subject that came quite naturally to him, for he was a man who would have dogmatised in any station of life. He was a tall, powerfully built, handsome old man with a face that was both long and broad, with high cheekbones that gave the lower half of his face an air of unnatural immobility but drew attention to the fine blue, anxious eyes that moved slowly and never far.
