gnboard
would be an unique curiosity.

Leaving the hospitable farmhouse of Mr. DeLorey, on a bright October
Sunday, after hearing Mass in the neat and commodious parish church
dedicated to St. Peter, a pleasant drive of three miles, bring us to the
Trappist Monastery of _Our Lady of Petit Clairvaux_, the buildings of
which are of brick, and form a quadrangle, of which one side has yet to
be erected.

Ringing the porter's bell we are admitted and handed over to Brother
Richard, the genial and amiable guest master, who is most assiduous in
his attentions to us.

The monastery was founded as a Priory, early in the present century by
Father Vincent, a native of France, and was raised to the dignity of an
abbey nine years ago, when the present Abbot, Father Dominic, was
consecrated. The community at present number thirty-seven, of whom
sixteen are priests and choir-religious, the remaining twenty-one being
lay brothers; the monks being chiefly Belgians, with a few from
Montreal, and a few from this vicinity.

The abbey is surrounded by four hundred acres of land, tolerably
fertile, though rough in part, and has excellent limestone quarries--the
monks burning as much as one hundred barrels of lime at once in their
kiln; they also manufacture all the bricks required for the multifarious
works which are incessantly in progress. Their domain is well watered
by a stream upon which the indefatigable monks have had a mill erected.
At the date of our visit, they had just finished a new dam composed of
immense blocks of limestone, and had almost completed a new and larger
mill--to supersede the old one--and which in addition to the ordinary
grist grinding will also be utilized, simultaneously, for carding,
sawing boards, and sawing shingles. The new mill has dimensions of 150 x
40 ft., and the main barn 220 x 40 ft. The latter building now
accommodates fifty heads of horned cattle, including some Jersey
thoroughbreds and Durhams and six horses. We were also shown some
Berkshire thoroughbred pigs, enormous, unwieldy brutes, one rather
youthful porker being estimated to weigh nearly six hundred pounds.

The monks make a large quantity of butter, all the year round, the sale
of which forms an important item of their revenue. The abbey has made
its repute all through the surrounding country, and it is scarcely
possible to over-estimate the benefit of this _model_ farm to the
inhabitants of adjacent lands; combining as it does the l