From time to time portions of land were sold to enable the boys to continue their wild carousals. Fratricidal strife ensued, and one brother spent the dismal residue of his days in the penitentiary, expiating the murder of the other. The vicious round of horse-racing, cock-fighting, fox-hunting, gambling and drinking once madly run had ended in the final wreck, and what remained of the estate fell into the hands of Mr. Herriott's father, whose agent held the mortgage. Sufficiently grim was the foundation of facts; yet still more appalling the superstructure of neighborhood traditions, and the ghoulish tales of superstitious servants. Venerable trees, whose sheltering arms might have veiled the ruin, had been over-grown by mistletoe, until very few survived to stand guard, and when a hunter crept with his pointer through broom-sedge waist high all over the lawn, his cigar spark set the whole aflame, and only two fine old oaks close to the house were left as sentinels. Later, a lightning bolt destroyed one; two years after, an equinoctial gale blew the other half across the mossy roof. Stark, weather beaten, its broken windows like eyeless sockets in a skull, the old house, dumb in desolation, stood in dire need of the mercies of bell, candle, censer, and aspergill to exorcise its garrison of unholy spectres. Five years after the place had been given by Noel Herriott to the "Brothers of the Order of Calvary," lime, paint, wallpaper, patient toil and a wise appreciation of the adaptability of angles, corridors, dormer windows and verandas, in architectural alterations, had transformed it into a quaintly irregular but picturesque structure. Outside mouldy walls were curtained with ampelopsis lace, while from a circular belfry between the original square rock chimneys, a deep-toned bell swung below a tall gilt cross, and uttered its holy message of peace to a troubled and tragic past. The basement had been converted into a refectory, kitchen and store room, the large apartments were partitioned into individual cells, and an infirmary; and the long drawing-room became a chapel, with a small oratory adjoining. Here a pipe organ sounded through the arch leading into the chapel, and over this opening a purple curtain fell when service ended. Beyond and in line with the oratory, a one-story wing with a wide cloistered piazza looked toward the rear of the house, and held a sacristy; then three small chambers fronting the vine-draped cloister behind whose arches paced, book in hand, fathers, brothers and lay brothers.