Discipline, however, was strict. There is a song, composed at the time by one of the pupils, which affords an instructive glimpse of the life of the strange colony. Some one seems to have informed Abélard of a group of students who were addicted to the familiar vice. He at once banished them from the colony, threatening to abandon the lectures unless they retired to Quincey. The poet of the group was an English youth, named Hilary, who had come to France a little before. Amongst his _Versus et ludi_, edited by Champollion, we find his poetic complaint of the falseness of the charge and the cruelty of their expulsion. It is a simple, vigorous, rhymed verse in Latin, with a French refrain. It is obviously intended to be sung in chorus, and it thus indirectly illustrates one of the probable recreations of the youths who were thus thrown upon their own resources. Many another of Hilary’s rough songs must have rung through the valley at nightfall. Perhaps Abélard recovered his old gift, and contributed to the harmless gaiety of the colony. Seared and scarred as he was, there was nothing sombre or sour about his piety, save in the moments of actual persecution. With all his keen and living faith and his sense of remorse, he remains a Breton, a child of the sun-light, sensitive to the gladdening force of the world. Not until his last year did he accept the ascetic view of pleasures which were non-ethical. Watchful over the faith and morals of the colony, he would make no effort to moderate the loud song with which they responded to the warm breath of nature. The happiness of his little world surged in the heart of the master for a time, but nature gave him a capacity for, and a taste of, manifold happiness, only that he might suffer the more. ‘I had one enemy—echo,’ he says in his autobiography. He was soon made uneasily conscious that the echo of his teaching and the echo of the glad life of the colony had reached Clairvaux.