Some of the brethren illustrated what they meant by obedience and humility, after a strange fashion. For example, there was one who having expressed an inclination to return to the world, was detained against his will. His place was in the kitchen, and the devastation he committed among the crockery was something stupendous--and probably not altogether unintentional. He was not only continually fracturing the delf earthenware dishes, but was incessantly running from the kitchen to the Abbot, from the Abbot to the Prior, from the Prior to the Sub-Prior, and from the Sub-Prior to the Master of the Novices to confess his fault. Thence he returned to the kitchen again, once more to smash whole crates of plates, following up the act with abundant confessions, and deriving evident enjoyment, alike in destroying the property, and assailing with noisy apologies the governing powers whom he was resolved to inspire with a desire of getting rid of him. In spite of forced detention there was a mock appearance of liberty at monthly assemblies. The brethren were asked if there was anything in the arrangement of the institution and its rules which they desired to see changed. As an affirmative reply, however, would have brought “penance” and “discipline” on him who made it, the encouraging phrase that “They had only to speak,” by no means rendered them loquacious, and every brother, by his silence, expressed his content. If death was the suicidal object of many, the end appears to have been generally attained with a speedy certainty. The superiors and a few monks reached an advanced age; only a few of the brethren died old men. Consumption, inflammation of the lungs, and abscess (at memory of the minute description of which the very heart turns sick), carried off the victims with terrible rapidity. Men entered, voluntarily or otherwise, in good health. If they did so, determined to achieve suicide, or were driven in by the government with a view of putting them to death, the end soon came, and was, if we may believe what we read, welcomed with alacrity. After rapid, painful, and unresisted decay, the sufferer saw as his last hour approached, the cinders strewn on the ground in the shape of a cross; a thin scattering of straw was made upon the cinders, and that was the death-bed upon which every Trappist expired. The body was buried in the habit of the order, as some knights have been in panoply, without coffin or shroud, and was borne to the grave in a cloth upheld by a few brothers. If it fell into its last receptacle with huddled-up limbs, De Rancé would leap into the grave and dispose the unconscious members, so as to make them assume an attitude of repose.