ted
him:' Time, Jews, and the task of Governing, will make a man's beard
very gray! 'In twelve years,' says Jocelin, 'our Lord Abbot had grown
wholly white as snow, _totus efficitur albus sicut nix_.' White atop,
like the granite mountains:--but his clear-beaming eyes still look
out, in their stern clearness, in their sorrow and pity; the heart
within him remains unconquered.

Nay sometimes there are gleams of hilarity too; little snatches of
encouragement granted even to a Governor. 'Once my Lord Abbot and I,
coming down from London through the Forest, I inquired of an old woman
whom we came up to, Whose wood this was, and of what manor; who the
master, who the keeper?'--All this I knew very well beforehand, and my
Lord Abbot too, Bozzy that I was! But 'the old woman answered, The
wood belonged to the new Abbot of St. Edmund's, was of the manor of
Harlow, and the keeper of it was one Arnald. How did he behave to the
people of the manor? I asked farther. She answered that he used to be
a devil incarnate, _daemon vivus_, an enemy of God, and flayer of the
peasants' skins,'--skinning them like live eels, as the manner of some
is: 'but that now he dreads the new Abbot, knowing him to be a wise
and sharp man, and so treats the people reasonably, _tractat homines
pacifice_.' Whereat the Lord Abbot _factus est hilaris_,--could not
but take a triumphant laugh for himself; and determines to leave that
Harlow manor yet unmeddled with, for a while.[16]

A brave man, strenuously fighting, fails not of a little triumph now
and then, to keep him in heart. Everywhere we try at least to give the
adversary as good as he brings; and, with swift force or slow watchful
manoeuvre, extinguish this and the other solecism, leave one
solecism less in God's Creation; and so _proceed_ with our battle, not
slacken or surrender in it! The Fifty feudal Knights, for example,
were of unjust greedy temper, and cheated us, in the Installation-day,
of ten knights'-fees;--but they know now whether that has profited
them aught, and I Jocelin know. Our Lord Abbot for the moment had to
endure it, and say nothing; but he watched his time.

Look also how my Lord of Clare, coming to claim his _un_due 'debt' in
the Court of Witham, with barons and apparatus, gets a Roland for his
Oliver! Jocelin shall report: 'The Earl, crowded round (_constipatus_)
with many barons and men-at-arms, Earl Alberic and others standing by
him, said, "That his bailiffs had given