Page:Flute and Violin and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances.djvu/154

136 almost expects to see coming along the dusty Kentucky road which winds through the valley meek brown palmers returning from the Holy Sepulchre, or through an upper window of the abbey to descry lance and visor and battle-axe flashing in the sunlight as they wind up a distant hill-side to the storming of some perilous citadel.

Ineffable influences, too, seem to bless the spot. Here, forsooth, some saint, retiring to the wilderness to subdue the devil in his flesh, lived and struggled and suffered and died, leaving his life as an heroic pattern for others who in the same hard way should wish to win the fullest grace of Christlike character. Perhaps even one of the old monks, long since halting towards the close of his pilgrimage, will reverently lead you down the aisle to the dim sepulchre of some martyr, whose relics repose under the altar while his virtues perpetually exhale heavenward like gracious incense.

The beauty of the region, and especially of the grounds surrounding the abbey, thus seems but a touching mockery. What have these inward-gazing, heavenward-gazing souls to do with the loveliness of Nature, with change of season, or flight of years, with green pastures and waving harvest-fields outside the wall, with flowers and orchards and vineyards within?

It was in a remote corner of the beautiful gardens of the monastery that a young monk, Father Palemon, was humbly at work one morning some years ago amid the lettuces and onions and fast-growing potatoes. The sun smote the earth with the fierce heat of departing June; and pausing to wipe the thick bead of perspiration from his forehead, he rested a moment, breathing heavily. His powerful legs were astride a row of the succulent shoots, and his hands clasped the handle of the hoe that