For Nature was in an ecstasy. The sunlight never fell more joyous upon the unlifting shadows of human life. The breeze that cooled his sweating face was heavy with the odor of the wonderful monastery roses. In the dark green canopy overhead two piping flame-colored orioles drained the last bright dew-drop from the chalice of a leaf. All the liquid air was slumbrous with the minute music of insect life, and from the honeysuckles clambering over the wall at his back came the murmur of the happy, happy bees. But what power have hunger and thirst and momentary weariness over the young? Father Palemon was himself part of the pure and beautiful nature around him. His heart was like some great secluded crimson flower that is ready to burst open in a passionate seeking of the sun. As he sat thus in the midst of Nature's joyousness and irrepressible unfoldings, and peaceful consummations, he forgot hunger and thirst and weariness in a feeling of delicious languor. But beneath even this, and more subtle still, was the stir of restlessness and the low fever of vague desire for something wholly beyond his experience. He sighed and opened his eyes. Right before them, on the spire beyond the gardens, was the ancient cross to which he was consecrated. On his shoulders were the penitential wounds he had that morning inflicted with the knotted scourge. In his ears was the faint general chorus of saints and martyrs, echoing backward ever more solemnly to the very passion of Christ. While Nature was everywhere clothing itself with living greenness, around his gaunt body and muscular limbs--over his young head and his coursing hot blood--he had wrapped the dead white cowl of centuries gone as the winding-sheet of his humanity. These were not clear thoughts in his mind, but the vaguest suggestions of feeling, which of late had come to him at times, and now made him sigh more deeply as he sat up and bent over again to tie the hempen cords. As he did so, his attention was arrested by the sound of voices just outside the monastery wall, which was low here, so that in the general stillness they became entirely audible. II. Outside the wall was a long strip of woodland which rose gently to the summit of a ridge half a mile away. This woodland was but little used. Into it occasionally a lay-brother drove the gentle monastery cows to pasture, or here a flock sheltered itself beneath forest oaks against the noontide summer heat. Beyond the summit lay the homestead of a gentleman farmer. As one descended this slope towards the abbey, he beheld it from the most picturesque side, and visitors at the homestead usually came to see it by this secluded approach.