out a monk at all:
the last monk was dead, and no one came to take his place.

It is a serious thing for a village to have no monk. To begin with,
there is no one to teach the lads to read and write and do arithmetic;
and there is no one to whom you can give offerings and thereby get
merit, and there is no one to preach to you and tell you of the sacred
teaching. So the village was in a bad way.

Then at last one evening, when the girls were all out at the well
drawing water, they were surprised by the arrival of a monk walking in
from the forest, weary with a long journey, footsore and hungry. The
villagers received him with enthusiasm, fearing, however, that he was
but passing through, and they furbished up the old monastery in a hurry
for him to sleep in. But the curious thing was that the monk seemed to
know it all. He knew the monastery and the path to it, and the ways
about the village, and the names of the hills and the streams. It
seemed, indeed, as if he must once have lived there in the village, and
yet no one knew him or recognised his face, though he was but a young
man still, and there were villagers who had lived there for seventy
years. Next morning, instead of going on his way, the monk came into the
village with his begging-bowl, as monks do, and went round and collected
his food for the day; and in the evening, when the villagers went to see
him at the monastery, he told them he was going to stay. He recalled to
them the monk who had planted the teak-trees, and how he had said that
when the trees were grown he would return. 'I,' said the young monk, 'am
he that planted these trees. Lo, they are grown up, and I am returned,
and now we will build a monastery as I said.'

When the villagers, doubting, questioned him, and old men came and
talked to him of traditions of long-past days, he answered as one who
knew all. He told them he had been born and educated far away in the
South, and had grown up not knowing who he had been; and that he had
entered a monastery, and in time became a Pongyi. The remembrance came
to him, he went on, in a dream of how he had planted the trees and had
promised to return to that village far away in the forest.

The very next day he had started, and travelled day after day and week
upon week, till at length he had arrived, as they saw. So the villagers
were convinced, and they set to work and cut down the great boles, and
built the monastery such as my friend saw. And the mo