sight, "only fancy making
such a fool of one's self!"

The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in Zurbaran's
ecstatic picture, is turned to use when the friars are busy. As a pocket
it relieves the over-burdened hands. A bottle of the local white wine
made by the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to this house by the West, is
carried in the cowl as a present to the stranger at the gates. The
friars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and
not only to make, but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be in the
room stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly. But that was
the last that was seen of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in _La
Legende des Siecles_ of disappearance as the thing which no creature
is able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by
quite an ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and there was
an end of it. Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancake
from the midst of the visible world be so much as divined by the
spectators. It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down to
meditate and drew his cowl about his head that the accident was
explained.

Every midnight the sweet contralto bells call the community, who get up
gaily to this difficult service. Of all duties this one never grows easy
or familiar, and therefore never habitual. It is something to have found
but one act aloof from habit. It is not merely that the friars overcome
the habit of sleep. The subtler point is that they can never acquire the
habit of sacrificing sleep. What art, what literature, or what life but
would gain a secret security by such a point of perpetual freshness and
perpetual initiative? It is not possible to get up at midnight without a
will that is new night by night. So should the writer's work be done,
and, with an intention perpetually unique, the poet's.

The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of the
French fields, and the hour of night--_l'ora di notte_--which rings
with so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the Adriatic
littoral, when the latest light is passing. It is the prayer for the
dead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord."

The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to the
sound of that evening prayer. The care of them is the central work of
the monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it is
princi