"It is not asking too much of you to climb so far for my pleasure?" "It is our mission to climb," she replied, wearily; "and if our strength fails, we rest by the way." Of herself she spoke literally; for when they came to the topmost story of the building, from which the observatory was reached by a short flight of steps, she sank into a seat placed near as a resting-place. "Will you go above, Sister?" she said feebly. "I will wait here." On the way up, also, the old man had been shaking his head with a stupid look of alarm and muttering his disapproval. "There is a high railing, Ezra," she now said to him. "You could not fall." But he refused to go farther; he suffered from vertigo. The young pair went up alone. For miles in all directions the landscape lay shimmering in the autumnal sunlight--a poor, rough, homely land, with a few farm houses of the plainest kind. Briefly she traced for him the boundary of the convent domain. And then he, thinking proudly of his own region, now lying heavy in varied autumnal ripeness and teeming with noble, gentle animal life; with rolling pastures as green as May under great trees of crimson and gold; with flashing streams and placid sheets of water, and great secluded homesteads--he, in turn, briefly described it; and she, loving the sensuous beauty of the world, listened more dreamily, merely repeating over and over, half to herself, and with more guarded courtesy half to him, "It must be very beautiful." But whether she suddenly felt that she had yielded herself too far to the influence of his words and wished to counteract this, or whether she was aroused to offset his description by another of unlike interest, scarcely had he finished when she pointed towards a long stretch of woodland that lay like a mere wavering band of brown upon the western horizon. "It was through those woods," she said, her voice trembling slightly, "that the procession of Trappists marched behind the cross when they fled to this country from France. Beyond that range of hills is the home of the Silent Brotherhood. In this direction," she continued, pointing southward, "is the creek which used to be so deep in winter that the priests had to swim it as they walked from one distant mission to another in the wilderness, holding above the waves the crucifix and the sacrament. Under that tree down there the Father who founded this convent built with his own hands the cabin that was the first church, and hewed out of logs the first altar. It was from those trees that the first nuns got the dyes for their vestments. On the floor of that cabin they sometimes slept in mid-winter with no other covering than an armful of straw. Those were heroic days."