. In the
wine vaults we beheld the wine running in deep red streams, traced it to
the refectory table, and noticed the rapidity with which it disappeared
before the worthy abbots. In the vaults it passed through every stage,
from the crushing of the grape to the final storing in barrels.

On one side of the cloisters was the partly restored church, high and
wide, with a magnificent nave of seven fine bays, so slightly pointed as
to be almost Romanesque. We were lost in wonder at the size of the
building, its simple grandeur, even as a partial ruin. Open to it from
the north side is the great sacristy, saddest room of all. For here we
find a solitary tombstone on which is inscribed the name of Philip Duke
of Wharton, who came over to the monastery, a lonely exile, and died at
the age of thirty-two, without friend or servant to soothe his last
moments, knowing little or nothing of the language of the monks who
surrounded him. Most melancholy of stories.

In the church, on each side of the high altar were remains of once
splendid tombs. They are now defaced, and the effigies have altogether
disappeared. Here was once the tomb of Jayme el Conquistador, which we
had looked upon that very morning with our amiable sacristan on the left
of the Coro in Tarragona cathedral. Its ancient resting-place in the
great monastery church is now an empty space.

The aisle behind the high altar contains five chapels, and behind these
outside the church lies the cemetery of the monks, a beautiful and ideal
spot with long rows of round arches one beyond another, so that you seem
to be looking into vistas of countless pillars. Above the arches and
pillars are walls of amazing thickness, with windows and projections,
all ending in moss-grown, crumbling outlines. Below, small mounds and
tombstones mark the resting-place of the dead. Here they sleep
forgotten; no sign or sound penetrates from the outer world, and those
who visit them are comparatively few.

The whole monastery is nothing but an accumulation of crumbling walls
still strong and majestic, of church and cloister, of palace and
palatial courts, of refined Gothic windows with broken tracery, of
ancient stairways and flying arches. Over all was the exquisite tone of
age.

It was originally a Cistercian monastery, dating from the middle of the
twelfth century. Its abbots were bishops, who lived in great pomp and
almost unlimited wealth and power. "Which they used according to their