nd then secondly and chiefly for the public scandal which had
gone abroad, that St. Edmund's Monks were going to kill their
Abbot. And when he had narrated how he went away on purpose till
his anger should cool, repeating this word of the philosopher, "I
would have taken vengeance on thee, had not I been angry," he
arose weeping, and embraced each and all of us with the kiss of
peace. He wept; we all wept:'--what a picture! Behave better,
ye remiss Monks, and thank Heaven for such an Abbot; or know at
least that ye must and shall obey him.

Worn down in this manner, with incessant toil and tribulation,
Abbot Samson had a sore time of it; his grizzled hair and beard
grew daily greyer. Those Jews, in the first four years, had
'visibly emaciated him:' Time, Jews, and the task of Governing,
will make a man's beard very grey! 'In twelve years,' says
Jocelin, 'our Lord Abbot had grown wholly white as snow, _totus
efficitur albus sicut nix.'_ White, atop, like the granite
mountains:--but his clear-beaming eyes still look out, in their
stern clearness, in their sorrow and pity; the heart within him
remains unconquered.

Nay sometimes there are gleams of hilarity too; little snatches
of encouragement granted even to a Governor. 'Once my Lord Abbot
and I, coming down from London through the Forest, I inquired of
an old woman whom we came up to, Whose wood this was, and of what
manor; who the master, who the keeper?'--All this I knew very
well beforehand, and my Lord Abbot too, Bozzy that I was! But
'the old woman answered, The wood belonged to the new Abbot of
St. Edmund's, was of the manor of Harlow, and the keeper of it
was one Arnald. How did he behave to the people of the manor? I
asked farther. She answered that he used to be a devil
incarnate, _daemon vivus_, an enemy of God, and flayer of the
peasants' skins,'--skinning them like live eels, as the manner of
some is: but that now he dreads the new Abbot, knowing him to be
a wise and sharp man, and so treats the people reasonably,
_tractat homines pacifice.'_ Whereat the Lord Abbot _factus est
hilaris,_--could not but take a triumphant laugh for himself;
and determines to leave that Harlow manor yet unmeddled with, for
a while.

A brave man, strenuously fighting, fails not of a little triumph,
now and then, to keep him in heart. Everywhere we try at least
to give the adversary as good as he brings; and, with swift
force or slow watchful manoeuvre