ore the contented,
weather-beaten look that comes of a life of easy labour spent in the
open air. His patched gaiters, the sacking tied round him with a cord
to serve as an apron, had the same simple appropriateness. We walked
leisurely about, gathering a hundred pretty impressions,--as the old
filbert-trees that fringed the orchard, the wall-flowers, which our
guide called the blood-warriors, on the ruined coping, a flight of
pigeons turning with a sharp clatter in the air. At last he left us to
go about his little business; and we, sitting on a broken
mounting-block in the sunshine, gazed lazily and contentedly at the
scene.

We attempted to picture something of the life of the Benedictines who
built the house. It must have been a life of much quiet happiness. We
tried to see in imagination the quaint clustered fabrics, the ancient
church, the cloister, the barns, the out-buildings. The brethren must
have suffered much from cold in winter. The day divided by services,
the nights broken by prayers; probably the time was dull enough, but
passed quickly, like all lives full of monotonous engagements. They
were not particularly ascetic, these Benedictines, and insisted much on
manual labour in the open air. Probably at first the monks did their
farm-work as well; but as they grew richer, they employed labourers,
and themselves fell back on simpler and easier garden-work. Perhaps
some few were truly devotional spirits, with a fire of prayer and
aspiration burning in their hearts; but the majority would be quiet
men, full of little gossip about possible promotions, about lands and
crops, about wayfarers and ecclesiastics who passed that way and were
entertained. Very few, except certain officials like the Cellarer, who
would have to ride to market, ever left the precincts of the place, but
laid their bones in the little graveyard east of the church. We make a
mistake in regarding the life and the buildings as having been so
picturesque, as they now appear after the long lapse of time. The
church was more venerable than the rest; but the refectory, at the time
of the dissolution, cannot have been long built; still, the old tiled
place, with its rough stone walls, must have always had a quaint and
irregular air.

Probably it was as a rule a contented and amiable society. The regular
hours, the wholesome fatigue which the rule entailed, must have tended
to keep the inmates in health and good-humour. But probab