s, those were very happy days for both of them, and very busy ones,
too. Every morning Gabriel would come to the Abbey with his hands filled
with the prettiest wild flowers he could find on the way; and from these
Brother Stephen would select the ones that pleased him best to paint.
Sometimes it would be the sweet wild hyacinths of pale blue, sometimes
the yellow marsh-marigolds, and again the little deep pink field-roses,
or some other of the innumerable lovely blossoms that every season
brought. And with them all, as he had said, he put in the small flying
creatures; butterflies and bees, scarlet ladybugs and pale green
beetles, whose wings looked like scraps of rainbows; and sometimes, in
his zeal, he even painted the little snails with their curled-up shells,
and the fuzzy caterpillars that happened to come in on Gabriel's
bouquets, and you really would never believe how very handsome even
these looked in the gold borders, when Brother Stephen got through with
them.

And so, day by day, the book grew in perfect beauty. And as Brother
Stephen worked, there was much for Gabriel to do also. For in those days
artists could not buy their ink and paints all ready for use as they do
to-day, but were obliged to prepare by hand almost all their materials;
and a little assistant such as Gabriel had to keep his hands busy, and
his eyes open, too.

For instance, the matter of the ink alone, Gabriel had to have on his
mind for weeks; for one could not then buy it ready made, in a bottle,
as we do now without the least trouble, but the monks or their
colour-grinders had to make it themselves.

And this is the way Gabriel had been taught to do it: morning after
morning of those early spring days, as he trudged along on his way to
the Abbey, he kept sharp watch on the young hawthorn-trees by the
roadside; and when their first buds showed, and while they were still
tiny, he gathered armfuls of the boughs, and carried them to the Abbey,
where he spread them out in a sunny corner of the courtyard to stay
until quite dry. Then he had to put them in a stone mortar and pound off
all the bark; and this he put to steep in great earthen jars of water,
until the water might draw all the sap from out the bark. All this took
several weeks to do.

And then Gabriel spent a number of busy days in the great kitchen. There
he had a large saucepan, and in it he placed, a little at a time, the
water in which the bark was steeping; and then raking