l furniture for the common necessities,
education, and worship, each man sat, day after day, week after week,
his mind full of high and heavenly thoughts, weaving the leaves of their
little palm-copse into baskets, which an aged monk exchanged for goods
with the more prosperous and frequented monasteries of the opposite
bank. Thither Philammon rowed the old man over, week by week, in a light
canoe of papyrus, and fished, as he sat waiting for him, for the common
meal. A simple, happy, gentle life was that of the Laura, all portioned
out by rules and methods, which were held hardly less sacred than those
of the Scriptures, on which they were supposed (and not so wrongly
either) to have been framed. Each man had food and raiment, shelter on
earth, friends and counsellors, living trust in the continual care of
Almighty God; and, blazing before his eyes, by day and night, the hope
of everlasting glory beyond all poets' dreams.... And what more would
man have had in those days? Thither they had fled out of cities,
compared with which Paris is earnest and Gomorrha chaste,--out of a
rotten, infernal, dying world of tyrants and slaves, hypocrites and
wantons,--to ponder undisturbed on duty and on judgment, on death and
eternity, heaven and hell; to find a common creed, a common interest,
a common hope, common duties, pleasures, and sorrows.... True, they had
many of them fled from the post where God had placed them, when they
fled from man into the Thebaid waste.... What sort of post and what
sort of an age they were, from which those old monks fled, we shall see,
perhaps, before this tale is told out.

'Thou art late, son,' said the abbot, steadfastly working away at his
palm-basket, as Philammon approached.

'Fuel is scarce, and I was forced to go far.'

'A monk should not answer till he is questioned. I did not ask the
reason. Where didst thou find that wood?'

'Before the temple, far up the glen.'

'The temple! What didst thou see there?'

No answer. Pambo looked up with his keen black eye.

'Thou hast entered it, and lusted after its abominations.'

'I--I did not enter; but I looked--'

'And what didst thou see? Women?'

Philammon was silent.

'Have I not bidden you never to look on the face of women? Are they not
the firstfruits of the devil, the authors of all evil, the subtlest of
all Satan's snares? Are they not accursed for ever, for the deceit of
their first mother, by whom sin entered into the world? A