"From the hour in which, by God's grace, I received the bishop's mitre and the holy crosier," resumed the abbot, with the air of a prince of the church, but with stooping head, and a kind of studied rhetorical tone, "be it said without all vain self-commendation, and to the honour of the Most High!--from the time St. Peter and his holy heir set me a ruler over these souls, and over this asylum of the pious and oppressed, I have striven according to my poor ability in the spirit of St. Benedict of Nurcia, and with the pious will of St. Benedict of Anianes before mine eyes, to give succour and protection to all travellers and pilgrims, and all outlawed and persecuted persons, against the wild turbulence of nature, as well as against human ferocity and the violence and persecution of an ungodly world. You just now interrupted me in a godly discourse, my guests! I spoke of the Church's might and authority, which is now so scandalously assaulted by the blind children of this world in our ungodly times. I was inculcating the duties of our holy order on the children, and for the edification of my dependents, on occasion of the crying deeds of violence and injustice we daily hear of and see before our eyes. You have also surely heard how shamelessly and treacherously the king's men have dealt with the outlawed Count Jacob's men in Halland, and what an outrageous and arbitrary act the royal vassal, Jonas Fries, hath lately perpetrated here, on the boundary of my abbey's consecrated ground and territory?" "What I have heard is almost past belief, pious Father Abbot," answered Brock; "but the matter is related very differently by the friends of freedom and those of despotism. Rumour hath indeed possibly exaggerated the stern vassal's despotic act." "My fugitive guest, who sits there, can bear testimony to the truth," said the abbot. "The unhappy victim to the lawlessness and barbarity of that royal vassal was his good friend and comrade." "It is as true as that I stand here," began the warrior-like personage in the monk's cloak, and rose from his seat. His accent sounded half-Norwegian; the combed-down hair slipped aside for an instant from his brow, and over his wild fiery eye a pair of bristly meeting eye-brows and a large red scar were visible. "Thus are law and justice now upheld in Denmark," he continued. "I had come down hither in reliance on truce and treaty, but truth and justice are no longer recognised, where the friends of freedom are outlawed. My comrade had saved my life, and freed me from a degrading captivity; he was, like myself, in the service of the Norwegian king. Three days since he was taken captive at my side in broad day-light, by Sir Jonas Fries himself, and dragged to his castle.--I escaped to the sanctuary of the abbey; but when I yesterday, with the pious abbot's men, would have liberated my unhappy comrade, we found him hanged, without law or sentence, on Jonas Fries's closed castle gate."