nventional
tree, with the stem issuing from its mouth, and its elongated tail
executing marvellous spiral curves. The illuminator was taken by
surprise the next instant, and the curve of the griffin's tail then
pending was by no means round in consequence.

"Alway at work, Father Wilfred?" [A fictitious person.]

"Bertram Lyngern," said the monk calmly, "thou hast marred my griffin."

"What, have I made him a wyvern?"

"That had less mattered. A twist of his tail is square, thy sudden
speech being the cause thereof."

"Let be, Father Wilfred. 'Tis a new pattern."

The monk smiled, but shook his head, and proceeded to erase the faulty
strokes by means of a large piece of pumice-stone. Bertram sat
contemplating his friend's work, curled up in the wide stone
window-ledge, to which he had climbed from the horse-block below it.
The lattice was open, so there was no hindrance to conversation.

"I would I were a knight!" said Bertram suddenly, after a few minutes'
silence on both sides.

"To wear gilded spurs?" inquired Wilfred calmly resuming his pen, and
going on with the griffin.

"Thou countest me surely not such a loon, Father Wilfred? No,--I long
to be great. I feel as though greatness stirred within me. But what
can I do,--a squire? If I were a knight I could sign my shoulder with
the holy cross, and go fight for our Lord's sepulchre. That were
something worth. But to dangle at the heels of my Lord Edward all the
day long, and fly an half-dozen hawks, and meditate on pretty sayings to
the Lady's damsels, and eat venison, and dance--Father Wilfred, is this
life meet for a man's living?"

The illuminator laid his pen down, and looked up at the lad.

"Bertram," he said, "just fifty years gone, I was what thou art, and my
thoughts then were thine."

"Thou wert, Father?" responded Bertram in an interested tone. "Well,
and what was the end?"

"The end is not yet. But the next thing was, that I did as thou fain
wouldst do:--I signed me with the good red cross, and I went to the Holy
Land."

"And thou earnest back, great of name, and blessed in soul?"

"I came back, having won no name, and with no blessing, for I knew more
of evil than when I set forth."

"But, Father, at our Lord's sepulchre!" urged Bertram.

"Youngling," said Wilfred, a rare, sweet smile flitting across his lips,
"dost thou blunder as Mary did? Is the Lord yet in the sepulchre? `He
is not here; He is risen.' And why then