ation on all that shall again
harbour them here: there were many dry eyes at their departure.

New life enters everywhere, springs up beneficent, the Incubus of Debt
once rolled away. Samson hastes not; but neither does he pause to
rest. This of the Finance is a life-long business with him;--Jocelin's
anecdotes are filled to weariness with it. As indeed to Jocelin it was
of very primary interest.

But we have to record also, with a lively satisfaction, that spiritual
rubbish is as little tolerated in Samson's Monastery as material. With
due rigour, Willelmus Sacrista, and his bibations and _tacenda_ are,
at the earliest opportunity, softly yet irrevocably put an end to. The
bibations, namely, had to end; even the building where they used to be
carried on was razed from the soil of St. Edmundsbury, and 'on its
place grow rows of beans:' Willelmus himself, deposed from the
Sacristy and all offices, retires into obscurity, into absolute
taciturnity unbroken thenceforth to this hour. Whether the poor
Willelmus did not still, by secret channels, occasionally get some
slight wetting of vinous or alcoholic liquor,--now grown, in a manner,
indispensable to the poor man? Jocelin hints not: one knows not how to
hope, what to hope! But if he did, it was in silence and darkness;
with an ever-present feeling that teetotalism was his only true
course. Drunken dissolute Monks are a class of persons who had better
keep out of Abbot Samson's way. _Saevit ut lupus_; was not the Dream
true! murmured many a Monk. Nay Ranulf de Glanvill, Justiciary in
Chief, took umbrage at him, seeing these strict ways; and watched
farther with suspicion: but discerned gradually that there was nothing
wrong, that there was much the opposite of wrong.

CHAPTER XI.

THE ABBOT'S WAYS.

Abbot Samson showed no extraordinary favour to the Monks who had been
his familiars of old; did not promote them to offices,--_nisi essent
idonei_, unless they chanced to be fit men! Whence great discontent
among certain of these, who had contributed to make him Abbot:
reproaches, open and secret, of his being 'ungrateful, hard-tempered,
unsocial, a Norfolk _barrator_ and _paltenerius_.'

Indeed, except it were for _idonei_, 'fit men,' in all kinds, it was
hard to say for whom Abbot Samson had much favour. He loved his
kindred well, and tenderly enough acknowledged the poor part of them;
with the rich part, who in old days had never acknowledged him, he
totally