The boy Hyacinth finds this strange creature a delightful playmate; and yet there is a bewildering mixture of charm and cruelty about him. The wild creatures of the forest will come at his call; he will play with them, and when tired of play will pierce them with an arrow or snap their fragile backs. Yet they nestle to him to die in his arms. Sometimes the cruelty breaks out in horrible ways. One evening the great pigeon-house is invaded by some creature unknown, which destroys the birds wholesale, leaving their bodies ruthlessly rent and torn. Yet next day the serf comes weeping to the mass; the chapel is found to be strangely decked with exotic flowers, and the serf himself joins with his harp in the canticles, drawing the rough voices to a silvery music. The Prior feels the magical influences of the place slowly involving him. He turns to his book, but there seems a madness in his brain. Instead of penning dry scientific discussions, he finds himself impelled against his will to crowd strange drawings and illuminations into his book, “winged flowers, or stars with human limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or mere notes of light and darkness from the actual horizon.” He comes to again and again from his wild work with a shock of terror and disgust. The boy Hyacinth becomes terrified at the Prior’s strange illusions, his loss of memory, his feverish periods of what seems such unhallowed work. But one hot, breathless evening he is drawn to play again with the serf, whom he begins to mistrust. They play with an ancient quoit, which is turned up from a grave. Stript to the skin, in wild excitement, they play late into the night, till the quoit flung by the serf, whether by accident or a sudden bloody impulse none knows, crashes into the boy’s brain, and leaves him dead on the turf. The serf flies; the Prior falls under suspicion of the murder, but is claimed by the monastic authorities and confined as obviously insane. He spends long hours gazing out of the windows, weeping, uttering strange words; till at last his senses return to him, but he dies just as his release is permitted. The study is full of beauty from end to end, beauty and strangeness side by side. Yet it is hard not to feel a sort of distempered, almost riotous, fancy at work under it all, and there is a cloistered horror about it, that reminds one of the old monastic legend of the monk who goes late into the dark church to recover a volume that he had left there, and finds a strange merry thing, in the habit of a priest, leaping all alone in unholy mirth before the altar.