The busy hum of men has long ceased from the spot where stand the fraternal yew-trees. Ages have passed away since the illuminator sat intent on his pleasant labours in the ruin hard by--since he put aside his liquid gold and Tyrian purple, and laid him down to rest in the burying-place beside the abbey. The copier of manuscripts closed his book there, more than five hundred years ago; he, too, is gone, and with him all those who lived while he was living. The abbot, who presided in regal state; the brotherhood, in their cowls and gowns; learned men, who studied in their quiet cells, and the busy comers and goers, who worked either in the abbey-fields, or performed such menial labours as the condition of the place required--not a trace of them remains: even the stately monastery is in ruins, but the yew-trees still cast the shadow of their noble branches on the grassless floor of red-brown hue. Their history is inseparably connected with that of the ruined abbey, for they stood in their present site, and afforded a shelter to its founders, long before one stone was laid upon another of the stately building. Those who passed in the days of the Saxon king, Ethelbald, through the Wolds of Yorkshire, near Skelldale, in their way to Ripon, might see a company of men assembled in a wild and romantic spot, watered by a rivulet, and surrounded with rocks and woods. These men were monks, who, desiring to imitate the extraordinary sanctity of the Cistercian abbey of Rieval, had withdrawn from their own monastery of St Mary's at York, and being sanctioned in their preference by the archbishop, they retired to this desolate and uncultivated spot. They had no house to shelter them, nor certainty of provisions to subsist on; but, in the depth of the lone valley, stood an aged elm, among the ample branches of which they erected a straw roof, and this was their only shelter for some time. But at length the rain fell fast, and the wind rose high, and they were constrained to quit the shelter of the elm for that of seven stately yew-trees, which grew on the south side of the valley, where a splendid abbey afterwards arose. These trees were of extraordinary size, for the trunk of one of them measured twenty-six feet in circumference, at the height of three feet above the root. Neither history nor tradition have preserved the knowledge of that period when they first arose from out the ground. Ages may have passed since, and countries rose and waned. The yew-trees of Skelldale may have continued growing even from the brilliant periods of Thebes and Memphis, when Phoenician barks traded to the Isle of Tin, and all around them was one wild impenetrable forest. But the yew-trees were now in their prime, and beneath them the monks took shelter by night and by day, from the rain and snow, and the cold east wind, that swept moaning through the valley. Thus they lived, drinking at the stream when thirsty, and allaying their hunger with the bread which their