to morasses
and dingles.
Summoned forth from their convent by those sounds, the monks who
inhabited the little islet began to issue from their lowly portal, with
cross and banner, and as much of ecclesiastical state as they had the
means of displaying; their bells at the same time, of which the edifice
possessed three, pealing the death toll over the long lake, which came
to the ears of the now silent multitude, mingled with the solemn chant
of the Catholic Church, raised by the monks in their procession. Various
ceremonies were gone through, while the kindred of the deceased carried
the body ashore, and, placing it on a bank long consecrated to the
purpose, made the deasil around the departed. When the corpse was
uplifted to be borne into the church, another united yell burst from the
assembled multitude, in which the deep shout of warriors and the shrill
wail of females joined their notes with the tremulous voice of age and
the babbling cry of childhood. The coronach was again, and for the last
time, shrieked as the body was carried into the interior of the
church, where only the nearest relatives of the deceased and the most
distinguished of the leaders of the clan were permitted to enter. The
last yell of woe was so terribly loud, and answered by so many hundred
echoes, that the glover instinctively raised his hands to his ears, to
shut out, or deaden at least, a sound so piercing. He kept this attitude
while the hawks, owls, and other birds, scared by the wild scream, had
begun to settle in their retreats, when, as he withdrew his hands, a
voice close by him said:
"Think you this, Simon Glover, the hymn of penitence and praise with
which it becomes poor forlorn man, cast out from his tenement of clay,
to be wafted into the presence of his maker?"
The glover turned, and in the old man with a long white beard who stood
close beside him had no difficulty, from the clear mild eye and the
benevolent cast of features, to recognise the Carthusian monk Father
Clement, no longer wearing his monastic habiliments, but wrapped in a
frieze mantle and having a Highland cap on his head.
It may be recollected that the glover regarded this man with a combined
feeling of respect and dislike--respect, which his judgment could not
deny to the monk's person and character, and dislike, which arose from
Father Clement's peculiar doctrines being the cause of his daughter's
exile and his own distress. It was not, therefore, with se
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