There is probably some show of reason in the idea that the groaning machinery of a mill should have helped to originate the extended notes of the sequence. The picturesqueness of the story is really its best claim to our notice. I well remember a mill by which I used often to pause in the stillness of night, listening to the wailing protracted cadences of the huge wheel which slowly turned in its bed as the buckets successively filled from the shut, but leaky gates. Hearing this, and comparing it with the “sequence” of the Catholic service, or with the long-drawn tones of a German choral, it is impossible not to be struck by the resemblance. Then there is another story—indeed, there are several in the Latin which could scarcely be inserted here—but there is certainly one other which both Baring-Gould and Maitland have had sufficient geniality to extract. It refers to the manner in which Notker, Ratpert, and Tutilo—“the three inseparables”—attended to the eavesdropping of one of Abbot Salomon’s spies. This spy was Sindolf, the _refectorarius_, or steward, a sour-visaged, crab-appleish kind of man, who was never so happy as when he had an evil speech to retail. He particularly delighted in fretting the temper of the abbot with reference to these poets and musicians, but they suspected his design and “set a watch because of him.” One evening after “lauds” the three were in the “writing-room” (_scriptorium_) where the manuscripts were prepared and kept, busy with their conversation and having thereto the permission of the prior. Sindolf sniffed scandal in the air, and flattened his ear against the opaque glass, where a convenient crack suffered him to listen to their words. It was night, and Tutilo, a shrewd, lively fellow (_homo pervicax_), was glad enough to get this occasion against the slinking traitor. In the _Acta Sanctorum_, and again in Mabillon, copied into the one hundred and thirty-first volume of Migne, we have old Ekkehard’s grim report of this monkish fun.