iracle of millinery. This lovely
creature, complete to a nail, much disturbed the mind of Hugh, and
played her pretty tricks upon her unexercised pastor: now demure, now
smiling, now darting soft glances, now reining in her eyes. But he, good
man, was rock or diamond. At last the fair creature actually stroked
his arm, and then Hugh was startled into a panic. His experience and
training had not been such as to fit him to deal with situations of this
sort. He fled. He cut out the skin of the arm where her rosy fingers had
rested. He found it impossible to escape from the sight of many fair
maids of Burgundy. Zuleika was fascinating enough, but his original Adam
within (whom he called Dalilah) was worse. He forsook his post, broke
his vow, and bolted to the Grande Chartreuse.

One modern biographer, who is shocked at his perjury to the prior, would
no doubt have absolved him if he had married the lass against his
canonic vows. Another thinks him most edifyingly liberal in his
interpretation of duty. Is there any need to forestall Doomsday in these
matters? The poor fellow was in both a fix and a fright. Alas! that
duties should ever clash! His own view is given with his own
decisiveness. "No! I never had a scruple at all about it. I have always
felt great delight of mind when I recall the deed which started me upon
so great an undertaking." The brothers of the Charterhouse gladly took
him in, the year being about 1160, and his age about twenty, let us say;
hardly an age anyhow which would fit him for dealing with pert minxes
and escaping the witcheries of the beauty which still makes beautiful
old hexameters.

CHAPTER II

BROTHER HUGH

"Ye might write th' doin's iv all th' convents iv th' wurruld on the
back of a postage stamp, an' have room to spare," says Mr. Dooley; and
we rather expect some hiatus in our history here. Goodbye to beef,
butter, and good red wheat; white corn, sad vegetables, cold water,
sackcloth take their place, with fasts on bread and water, and festivals
mitigated by fish. Goodbye to pillows and bolsters and linen shirts.
Welcome horse-hair vests, sacking sheets, and the "bitter bite of the
flea,"--sad entertainment for gentlemen! Instead of wise and merry talk,
wherein he excelled, solitary confinement in a wooden cell (the brethren
now foist off a stone one upon credulous tourists) with willing slavery
to stern Prior Basil. The long days of prayer and meditation, the nights
short with