h sky.

The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it is
modern; and the friars look young in another--they are like their
brothers of an earlier time. No one, except the journalists of
yesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint," or "old
world." No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by the
excursionists.

With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers work
upon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a prosperous bee-
farm. A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hanging
the washed linen in the sun. A printing press, and a machine which
slices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby is
guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the
obscure impulses of a dog's heart--atoned for by long and self-conscious
remorse--he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make
doggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on
monastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his
editions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be got among
the cabins of the Flintshire hills. Homeward, over the verge, from other
valleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a moth.

To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people have
become well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of
intelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look at
them without obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation Army girl
that you heard the brutal word of contempt. She had come to the place
with some companions, and with them was trespassing, as she was welcome
to do, within the monastery grounds. She stood, a figure for Bournemouth
pier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the Umbrian
saint--the friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi and
between the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuries
continually since the coming of the friars. One might have asked of her
the kindness of a fellow-feeling. She and he alike were so habited as to
show the world that their life was aloof from its "idle business." By
some such phrase, at least, the friar would assuredly have attempted to
include her in any spiritual honours ascribed to him. Or one might have
asked of her the condescension of forbearance. "Only fancy," said the
Salvation Army girl, watching the friar out of