Before he could remember, he had lost his father, a clever tinker who could make silver brooches and mend brass kettles and had married an Irish colleen in a seashore village. Then pirates raided the coast, and the Irish girl with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under a ruined house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, and since then he had gone from one village to another as the fancy took him. For a week or more he might be herding goats or sheep, fishing, or cutting peat for fires; he stayed nowhere longer than he chose and owned nothing in the world except what he wore. Under the tunic there hung a small leather bag with the few relics his mother had left him. He could make a fish-hook of a bit of bone, a boat of reeds, or a snare of almost any material he could find where he happened to be. From this place where he sat he could see a valley of wet meadow-land, in the midst of which gray stone buildings were massed inside a wall which enclosed also the garden and the cloisters. He knew that this was an abbey. Years before a company of twelve monks and a Prior had come there to found a religious house. They brought from England an arklike chest containing some manuscript books, and relics, chalices, candlesticks and other treasures, and little else except their long black robes, girdles and sandals. These monks, working in orderly and diligent fashion under their superior's direction, had built a chapel, a dormitory, a dining-hall, store-houses, barns,--and the community grew. The building was done first of rough stone and wattle-work after the manner of the country, but later of good cut stone. Half the countryside had been employed there when the chapel was building. They had drained the marsh for their meadow-land, their young trees were growing finely, their vineyard was thriving in a sunny selected nook, their sheep flecked the hills all about them. A deep fish-pond had been made where now two monks sat fishing. Padraig wondered if they had caught anything as good as the lithe trout he had taken from a mountain stream. He was hungry, for he had been afoot since daylight, and he was wondering whether to make a fire and cook his trout or offer them to the monks in exchange for a supper. The wind that blew from the eight-side cone-roofed kitchen brought to his nostrils a smell so delicious that he was drawn like a fish on a line to the gates of the abbey. He had met wandering monks and friars, but this was the first abbey he had entered. When he knocked at the gate and the porter asked him what he wanted, he was a little excited and rather scared.