an eagle for the
life of a salmon; and thrice the life of a salmon for the life of a
yew; but the Lord God liveth for ever--the Lord God liveth for ever!"

That same night the alabaster box was broken and the precious ointment
poured out. And on the Prior's breast they placed the golden rose, and
under the great red hawthorn in the midst of the cloister-garth they
laid him, O Lord, beneath the earth which is Thy footstool.

At the same hour in which he was taken from us there was a great crying
and lamentation of the wild creatures in the forest, and the tall stags
bellowed and clashed their antlers against the gates of the monastery.

In the place of Prior Oswald, Father Bede was made Prior.

Whether the spirit of Prior Oswald ever returned to earth the book does
not tell, but the Lost Brother, the companion of his youth, lived in
the house of Kilgrimol to old age, and in the days of Bede's rule he
made a good end.

The King Orgulous

To and fro in the open cloister of Essalona walked the monk Desiderius,
musing and musing. Every now and again he stayed in his paces to feed
a tall white stork and two of her young, which stood on the parapet
between the pillars of the cloister; and though for the most part his
dole went to the storklings, the mother was well content with his
stroking of her head and soft white backfeathers.

Then he resumed his slow walk, turning over and over in his perplexed
mind the questions of grace and nature, and praying for light in the
obscure ways where reason groped darkling. Meanwhile the storks stood
grave and patient, as if they too had matter for deep musing.

As in this day, so in the ancient time the convent of Essalona was
perched on a beetling crag on the northern side of the Sarras
mountains. There the mighty ridge, with its belts of virgin pinewood
and its stony knolls and pastoral glens, breaks off suddenly in a
precipitous escarpment; and, a thousand feet below, the land is an
immense green plain, sweeping away to the blue limits of the north. It
is as though the sea had once on a time run up to the mountain wall and
torn down the tawny rocks for sand and shingle, and had then drawn back
into the north, leaving the good acres to grow green in the sun.
Through the plain winds a river, bright and slow; in many places the
fruitful level is ruffled with thicket and coppice; and among the far
fields the white walls of farms and hamlets glitter amid their boskage.
W