The thronging multitudes, the incense laden air, the swelling chants, the imposing processions, the pealing anthem, all came to the remembrance of this solitary youth, as he knelt before the ruined altar, where as an acolyte he had so often knelt, and wept. Rising, for it was near midnight, to fulfil his tryst, he traversed the south transept where the famous clock had once stood which told not only day and hour, but the changes of sun and moon,[55] and made for a door in the south aisle of the nave. Here he paused as his eye fell upon the epitaph to the memory of Richard Beere, the predecessor of the last Abbot of Glastonbury, who elected in the year 1493, had died in peace, in the thirty-first year of his rule, the year before the birth of Cuthbert; happy was he in the time of his life, happy too in his death, for he was taken from the evil to come; although there was no visible cloud in the horizon, to make him say with Louis Quinze, “_Après moi le déluge_.” Glastonbury Abbey had then attained the summit of its prosperity, being one of the richest and most renowned of all the abbeys of England. Cuthbert passed through the doorway in the south aisle, and entered the cloisters, which stood at the south side of the great church, forming a square of two hundred and twenty feet, surrounded by an arcade in which the poor monks had once been accustomed to take the air in winter, and to seek the shade in summer, while they held colloquy in their recreation hour. Leaving the chapter house on the east, he turned the angle of the cloister, and passed along the front of the refectory on his road to the Abbot’s lodgings, which lay to the south-west of the pile. But here he paused, and recalled the past as he gazed around the cloisters: on the east lay the _chapter house_, which he had once regarded with such reverent awe, where had been the Lord Abbot’s throne, so worthily filled by its last occupant; behind him the _refectory_ occupied the whole south side of the square, where Cuthbert remembered seven long tables whereat the monks had taken their sober repasts,[56] while one of their number read from the pulpit the Holy Scriptures or some godly tome of the fathers: to the west lay the _fratery_ or apartments of the novices, and to the north was the great south front of the church. Over the cloisters was a gallery, from which had opened the _library_, wherein had been many valuable MSS., including one of Livy, which perhaps contained the lost decades: it had been sold to wrap up groceries; the _scriptorium_, where the ill-fated brethren had made copies of the Holy Scriptures and the Office books of the Church; the _common room_, wherein around the great hearth the brethren assembled in hours of leisure; the _wardrobe_, and the _treasury_. All lay alike in sad ruin: all that _would_ sell had been sold: the mere shell of the building remained.