Some of us can remember how under the old system at Cambridge the Senior Fellows remained in College all their lives, their interests centered in the Society, dining in hall every day, sitting over the College port in Combination Room every day. Few among the Seniors, as one remembers them, were any longer capable of intellectual work; they had never had any ambitions; they played bowls in the garden; they walked every day the customary round; they were in Orders; they were regular at chapel, and they led decorous lives; when they grew very old they fell into the hands of their bedmaker. Of other women they knew little. Such as were these aged dons, so were, I believe, the monks of Westminster,--dull and respectable, decorous, obedient to so much of the Rule as they could not escape, and stupid and ignorant,--since they had been locked up within those walls from childhood. Just as those old dons had long since lost any enthusiasm for learning which might once have possessed them, so our friend Hugh de Steyninge, plodding through the monotonous days, with the iteration of the same services till he knew every line by heart, had long ceased to connect their words with any meaning. [Illustration: A. SQUARE WINDOW (NOW WALLED UP), USED BY THE ABBOT TO MAINTAIN SURVEILLANCE OF THE MONKS AT NIGHT.] There is one exception to the general charge of worldliness and luxury. It is an officer--rather a resident--of the Abbey concerning whom historians are mostly silent. Of him alone it can be said that he was most certainly neither luxurious nor sensual nor a hypocrite. This man was the Solitary, the Recluse, the Anchorite or Ankret, of the Abbey.