nough for the torrent that raced madly over its yellow
pebbles. I lingered awhile in the meadow by the stream, looking at the
rock-clinging sanctuary before wandering in search of the unknown up
the narrow gorge.

In a garden terraced upon the lower flank of the rock, the labour of
generations having combined to raise a soil there deep enough to
support a few plum, almond, and other fruit trees, a figure all in
black is hard at work transplanting young lettuces. It is that of a
teaching Brother. He is a thin grizzled man of sixty, with an
expression of melancholy benevolence in his rugged face. I have
watched him sitting upon a bench with his arm round some little
village urchin by his side, while the children from the outlying
hamlets, sprawling upon a heap of stones in the sun, ate their mid-day
meal of bread and cheese or buckwheat pancakes that their mothers had
put into their baskets before they trudged off in the early morning. I
have noticed by many signs that he is full of sympathy for the young
peasants placed in his charge. Yet with all his kindness he is
melancholy. So many years in one place, such a dull routine of duty,
such a life of abnegation without the honour that sustains and
encourages, such impossibility of being understood and appreciated by
those for whose sake he has been breaking self upon the wheel of
mortification since his youth, have made him old before the time and
fixed that look of lurking sadness in his warmly human eyes.

There are few problems more profound than that of the courage with
which men like him continue their self-imposed penal-servitude until
they become too infirm to work and are sent to die in some refuge for
aged _freres_. They have accepted celibacy and poverty, that they may
the better devote their lives to the instruction of children. They
have no sacerdotal state or ideal, no ecclesiastical nor social
ambition to help them. They must be always humble; they must not even
be learned, for much knowledge in their case would be considered a
dangerous thing. Their minds must not rise above their work. They
guide dirty little fists in the formation of pot-hooks, and when they
have led the boys' intelligence up a few more steps of scholarship the
end is achieved. The boy goes out into the world and refreshes his
mind with new occupation; but the poor Brother remains chained to his
dreary task, which is always the same and is never done.

And what are the wages in return f