sed to be intended for
satire, and knew to be fatuously wrong. I was thoroughly acquainted
with monks--in books--and well knew the cut of their long frocks, their
shaven polls, and their fascinating big dogs, with brandy-bottles round
their necks, incessantly hauling happy travellers out of the snow. The
only dog at the settlement was an Irish terrier, and the good fellows
who owned him, and were owned by him, in common, wore clothes of the
most nondescript order, and mostly cultivated side-whiskers. I had
wandered up there one day, searching (as usual) for something I never
found, and had been taken in by them and treated as friend and comrade.
They had made me free of their ideal little rooms, full of books and
pictures, and clean of the antimacassar taint; they had shown me their
chapel, high, hushed; and faintly scented, beautiful with a strange new
beauty born both of what it had and what it had not--that too familiar
dowdiness of common places of worship. They had also fed me in their
dining-hall, where a long table stood on trestles plain to view, and all
the woodwork was natural, unpainted, healthily scrubbed, and redolent of
the forest it came from. I brought away from that visit, and kept by me
for many days, a sense of cleanness, of the freshness that pricks the
senses--the freshness of cool spring water; and the large swept spaces
of the rooms, the red tiles, and the oaken settles, suggested a comfort
that had no connexion with padded upholstery.

On this particular morning I was in much too unsociable a mind for
paying friendly calls. Still, something in the aspect of the place
harmonised with my humour, and I worked my way round to the back, where
the ground, after affording level enough for a kitchen-garden, broke
steeply away. Both the word Gothic and the thing itself were still
unknown to me; yet doubtless the architecture of the place, consistent
throughout, accounted for its sense of comradeship in my hour of
disheartenment. As I mused there, with the low, grey, purposeful-looking
building before me, and thought of my pleasant friends within, and what
good times they always seemed to be having, and how they larked with the
Irish terrier, whose footing was one of a perfect equality, I thought
of a certain look in their faces, as if they had a common purpose and
a business, and were acting under orders thoroughly recognised and
understood. I remembered, too, something that Martha had told me,
about thes