fasting after the
above-mentioned services of prayer, put on albs and invited the aid of
certain lay brethren. They mixed the flour of wheat that had been sifted
by the novices, grain by grain, with a due quantity of water; and a monk
wearing gloves baked the wafers one by one over a large fire of
brushwood, in an iron mould stamped with the proper symbols."

"That reminds me," said Durtal, as he lighted a cigarette, "of the mill
for grinding the wheat for the offering."

"I am familiar with the mystical wine-press which was often represented
by the glass-workers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries," said the
Abbe Gevresin. "That was practically a paraphrase of Isaiah's prophetic
verse: 'I have trodden the wine-press alone, and there was no man with
me'; but the mystic mill is, I own, unknown to me."

"I have seen it once at Berne, in a window of the fifteenth century,"
said the Abbe Plomb.

"I also saw it in the cathedral at Erfurt, painted, not on glass, but on
a panel. The picture is by no known painter, and dated 1534. I can see
it now: Above, God the Father, a good old man with a snowy beard, solemn
and thoughtful; and the mill, like a coffee mill, fixed on the edge of a
table, with the drawer open below. The evangelical beasts are emptying
into the hopper, skins full of scrolls on which are written the
effective Sacramental words. These scrolls are swallowed in the body of
the machine, and come out into the drawer, thence falling into a chalice
held by a Cardinal and Bishop kneeling at the table.

"And the texts are changed into a little Child in the act of blessing
while the four Evangelists turn a long silver crank in the right-hand
corner of the panel."

"What seems strange," remarked the Abbe Gevresin, "is that it should be
the formula of Transubstantiation and not the substance that is changed,
and that the Evangelists, twice represented--under their animal and
their human aspect--pour into the mill and grind. And also that the
sacred oblation should be represented by the living flesh.

"Still, it is correct; since the consecrating words are uttered, the
bread has ceased to be. This scheme of implied meaning, though somewhat
strange, in a literal presentment, a scene of actual grinding--the wheat
in the grain, in flour, and in the Host--this obvious intention of
ignoring the species, the appearances, and substituting the reality
which is invisible to sense, must have been adopted by the painter in