Page:A Book of the West (vol. 2).djvu/289

Rh "Then serve up the bacon and the water."

Now there was at table a lay brother, and when the bacon was set before him he thrust his platter contemptuously from him, for he was tired of bacon, and when out visiting, by dad ! he expected to be fed like a gintleman.

"Hah!" said Kieran turning angry, "you are dainty, son of Comgal; it is just such as you who would not scruple to eat ass's flesh in Lent."

Across the backbone of Cornwall is Ladock, and if I am not mistaken, Kieran planted there his old nurse, Cocca, who also became head of a religious house for women.

It is said that every Christmas night, after divine service at his own monastery, Kieran started off walking, and arrived at early morning to perform divine worship for his old nurse, and gave her the compliments of the season. The date of his death is not known, but it is thought to have been about 550.

A friend writes to me:—

"It may be foolishness, but to me such a place as the ruined church of Peranzabulo appeals most powerfully. I determined to find it unaided, and when found I spent hours there, sometimes at dark, trying as best I might to recall the place as it once was, and to revivify the bones which were lying in several little heaps where the workmen, who had been railing about the ruin, had collected them.

"It seems to me that one loses a great deal in stifling and choking the imagination.

"In the dusk of evening, with the swallows in vast quantities gathered for their flight to the south, and the