second crop of grass,
which may be more tender than the first, but gives no nourishment.

15.
RELEASE.

A frightful casualty was required to restore Ivo to his early
resolutions.

On St. Bartholomew's day, Bart had escaped from his keepers in the
hospital. Racked by qualms of conscience, he sprang from a window and
dashed out his brains. To prevent the effect of this deed upon the
reputation of the convent, and in charitable consideration of Bart's
partial derangement, it was resolved to give him a burial in the usual
form. The conventuaries, wearing crape, followed the corpse to the
sound of funeral music. Ivo blew the horn: its tones fluttered in the
air like the shreds of ribbons rudely torn. At the grave Ivo stepped
forward and made a heart-rending speech in memory of his lost comrade.
At first he stumbled a little: all his pulses were trembling. For the
first time in his life Death had really rolled a corpse at his feet,
crying, "Learn, by death, to study life!" As he had fancied Clement
lying dead at his feet, so now in reality the corpse of a companion of
his youth, with whom he had spent so many years, lay before him. First
he spoke in praise of life,--of the free, glad air of heaven,--and
desired to banish death far from the haunts of men; but soon his speech
warmed, and his words flowed as from a living spring; and, with
griefless fervor, he praised the lot of the orphan now happy with his
Father in heaven. Consecration overtook him before the hand of a priest
had touched his head. He soared upward to the throne of the universal
Parent, knelt, and implored grace for his friend. In short and broken
sentences he then prayed for grace to himself, and for his own happy
end and that of all men.

To the sound of a triumphal march the conventuaries returned home.
Though the contemplation of death was one of their chief exercises,
yet, like the standing-armies of earth, they, the standing-army of
heaven, were not left long to the influence of sorrow, but were
required forthwith to renew their strides toward the goal of their
efforts. Ivo's courage also returned. Fate had robbed him of the two
associates who had stood nearest to him,--of the one by spiritual, and
of the other by bodily, suicide. He was alone, and therefore
untrammelled. When the others, who had looked upon life and death with
less of seriousness, went in a body to a tavern to o