ife in a monastery, though at all seasons my
grandfather strove to reason it into him, sometimes with words and
examples, at others with his thick cudgel of holly, that still hangs
over the ingle in the smaller sitting-room. The end of it was that the
lad was sent to the priory here in Bungay, where his conduct was of such
nature that within a year the prior prayed his parents to take him back
and set him in some way of secular life. Not only, so said the prior,
did my father cause scandal by his actions, breaking out of the priory
at night and visiting drinking houses and other places; but, such was
the sum of his wickedness, he did not scruple to question and make
mock of the very doctrines of the Church, alleging even that there
was nothing sacred in the image of the Virgin Mary which stood in the
chancel, and shut its eyes in prayer before all the congregation when
the priest elevated the Host. 'Therefore,' said the prior, 'I pray you
take back your son, and let him find some other road to the stake than
that which runs through the gates of Bungay Priory.'

Now at this story my grandfather was so enraged that he almost fell into
a fit; then recovering, he bethought him of his cudgel of holly, and
would have used it. But my father, who was now nineteen years of age and
very stout and strong, twisted it from his hand and flung it full fifty
yards, saying that no man should touch him more were he a hundred times
his father. Then he walked away, leaving the prior and my grandfather
staring at each other.

Now to shorten a long tale, the end of the matter was this. It was
believed both by my grandfather and the prior that the true cause of my
father's contumacy was a passion which he had conceived for a girl of
humble birth, a miller's fair daughter who dwelt at Waingford Mills.
Perhaps there was truth in this belief, or perhaps there was none. What
does it matter, seeing that the maid married a butcher at Beccles and
died years since at the good age of ninety and five? But true or false,
my grandfather believed the tale, and knowing well that absence is the
surest cure for love, he entered into a plan with the prior that my
father should be sent to a monastery at Seville in Spain, of which
the prior's brother was abbot, and there learn to forget the miller's
daughter and all other worldly things.

When this was told to my father he fell into it readily enough, being
a young man of spirit and having a great desire to s