ave hindered his climbing the wall, he began to scale it. His foot
readily found a chink between the stones; he sprang up, seizing the
coping, and was on the other side without even touching the top of the
wall over which he bounded. He picked up his cloak, threw it over
his shoulder, hooked it, and crossed the orchard to a little door
communicating with the cloister. The clock struck eleven as he passed
through it. Roland stopped, counted the strokes, and slowly walked
around the cloister, looking and listening.

He saw nothing and heard no noise. The monastery was the picture of
desolation and solitude; the doors were all open, those of the cells,
the chapel, and the refectory. In the refectory, a vast hall where the
tables still stood in their places, Roland noticed five or six bats
circling around; a frightened owl flew through a broken casement, and
perched upon a tree close by, hooting dismally.

"Good!" said Roland, aloud; "I'll make my headquarters here; bats and
owls are the vanguards of ghosts."

The sound of that human voice, lifted in the midst of this solitude,
darkness and desolation, had something so uncanny, so lugubrious about
it, that it would have caused even the speaker to shudder, had not
Roland, as he himself said, been inaccessible to fear. He looked about
for a place from which he could command the entire hall. An isolated
table, placed on a sort of stage at one end of the refectory, which had
no doubt been used by the superior of the convent to take his food apart
from the monks, to read from pious books during the repast, seemed to
Roland best adapted to his needs. Here, backed by the wall, he could
not be surprised from behind, and, once his eye grew accustomed to the
darkness, he could survey every part of the hall. He looked for a seat,
and found an overturned stool about three feet from the table, probably
the one occupied by the reader or the person dining there in solitude.

Roland sat down at the table, loosened his cloak to insure greater
freedom of movement, took his pistols from his belt, laid one on the
table, and striking three blows with the butt-end of the other, he said,
in a loud voice: "The meeting is open; the ghosts can appear!"

Those who have passed through churches and cemeteries at night have
often experienced, without analyzing it, the supreme necessity of
speaking low and reverently which attaches to certain localities. Only
such persons can understand the strange i