A minute later, Fulvia, the grandchild of the Bishopess, came out of the house with several of her girl friends, with a lighted brand in her hand, wherewith she set the pyre on fire. The gladsome cries of the girls and children greeted the bright and sparkling column of fire that mounted heavenward. At the signal, the people down in the valley who were still at work in the fields, started homeward, and an hour later they marched in a body, men, women and children, the old and the young, in festive groups to the monastery of Charolles. CHAPTER II. THE ANNUAL CELEBRATION. The monastic establishment of Charolles was a large sized and solid stone building, without any ornamentation whatever. Besides the cells of the monks, it contained within its precincts a granary, a chapel, a hospital for the male patients of the valley, and a school for young children. During the fifty years of the existence of the settlement, the monk laborers re-elected Loysik every year their superior, and, a strange thing in these days, they all remained lay, Loysik having ever warned them against rashly binding themselves by eternal vows and confounding themselves with the clergy. The monks of the monastery of Charolles lived under rules which they established for themselves and rigorously observed. The discipline of the Order of St. Benoit, which was adopted by a large number of the monasteries of Gaul, seemed to Loysik, by reason of some of its statutes, to either annihilate or at least, degrade human conscience, reason and dignity. If, for instance, the superior ordered a monk to do a thing that was physically impossible, then the monk, after having humbly informed his chief of the impossibility of what was demanded of him, was in duty bound to bow before the order. Another of the statutes provided literally: "It is not allowed to a monk to have his own body and will under his own command." Worst of all it was formally forbidden a monk "to either defend or protect his fellow monk, even though they be united by the bonds of consanguinity." Such a voluntary renunciation of the tenderest and self-respecting impulses; such an abnegation of conscience and of human reason, carried to the point of imbecility; such passive obedience, which turns man into a soulless machine, a species of corpse, seemed too absurd to Loysik, and he resisted the invasion of Charolles by the rules of the Order of St. Benoit, however generally accepted they otherwise were in Gaul.