"Modern frivolity feels tempted to giggle when it hears that the animal always in especial favour with the monks was the ass. His simplicity of manners, humility of carriage, and usually taciturn habits,--the sign of the cross which he bears on his back--the manner in which he hangs his head, as the rules of most orders command the pious brethren themselves to do,--the patience with which he submits to discipline,--all this naturally recommended him to these devout recluses. They were even ready, it seems, to regard him as a kind of oracle in difficult cases. "It was, we may recollect, not merely the spirit of monasticism, but the spirit of all those ages, to see in what we call trivial chances the ordination of a higher power. Do we not find, in the history of Nurnberg, that in the fourteenth century, two hundred years after the building of Altenberg convent, a worthy and respected burgher of that city, one Berthold Tucher, of the renowned family of that name, wishing to know whether it was the will of God that he should remain in the world and marry again, or take holy vows and devote himself to the monastic life did, after praying devoutly in the little chapel in his house, 'at the corner of the Milk Market, there where you turn into Dog Alley,' resolve to ascertain the Divine pleasure by the simple method of tossing up a halfpenny; three times did he toss it, and three times did it come up heads, and thereupon he accepted the oracle, and went directly and fetched himself a wife.