It was in a remote corner of the beautiful gardens of the monastery that a young monk, Father Palemon, was humbly at work one morning some years ago amid the lettuces and onions and fast-growing potatoes. The sun smote the earth with the fierce heat of departing June; and pausing to wipe the thick bead of perspiration from his forehead, he rested a moment, breathing heavily. His powerful legs were astride a row of the succulent shoots, and his hands clasped the handle of the hoe that gave him a staff-like support in front. He was dressed in the sacred garb of his order. His heavy sabots crushed the clods in the furrows. His cream-colored serge cowl, the long skirt of which would have touched the ground, had been folded up to his knees and tied with hempen cords. The wide sleeves, falling away, showed up to the elbows the superb muscles of his bronzed arms; and the calotte, pushed far back from his head, revealed the outlines of his neck, full, round, like a column. Nearly a month had passed since the convent barber had sheared his poll, and his yellow hair was just beginning to enrich his temples with a fillet of thick curling locks. Had Father Palemon's hair been permitted to grow, it would have fallen down on each side in masses shining like flax and making the ideal head of a saint. But his face was not the face of a saint. It had in it no touch of the saint's agony--none of those fine subtle lines that are the material net-work of intense spirituality brooding within. Scant vegetarian diet and the deep shadows of cloistral life had preserved in his complexion the delicate hues of youth, noticeable still beneath the tan of recent exposure to the summer sun. His calm, steady blue eyes, also, had the open look peculiar to self-unconscious childhood; so that as he stood thus, tall, sinewy, supple, grave, bareheaded under the open sky, clad in spotless white, a singular union of strength, manliness, and unawakened innocence, he was a figure startling to come upon. As he rested, he looked down and discovered that the hempen cords fastening the hem of his cowl were becoming untied, and walking to the border of grass which ran round the garden just inside the monastery wall, he sat down to secure the loosened threads. He was very tired. He had come forth to work before the first gray of dawn. His lips were parched with thirst. Save the little cup of cider and a slice of black bread with which he had broken his fast after matins, he had not tasted food since the frugal meal of the previous noon. Both weary and faint, therefore, he had hardly sat down before, in the weakness of his flesh, a sudden powerful impulse came upon him to indulge in a moment's repose. His fingers fell away from the untied cords, his body sank backward against the trunk of the gnarled apple-tree by which he was shaded, and closing his eyes, he drank in eagerly all the sweet influences of the perfect day.