Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/40

 granted) cannot fail to notice the extreme youth of most of those who are engaged in weighing the tremendous problem of an irrevocable choice. They have, as a rule, entered the preliminary college at the age of thirteen, and have been called upon to come to a decision, fraught with such momentous consequences, at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

The novitiate, as the convent is called in which the novices are incarcerated, is normally a distinct monastery: economy of space, however, frequently compels the monks merely to separate the wing of some existing monastery for that purpose. In either case the regulations for its complete isolation are very severe. The novices are never allowed to leave the monastery during that year for any pretext whatever, and they are permitted to receive but few visitors and to have little correspondence (which is carefully examined) with the outside world. The natural result is that their comparison of monastic and secular life is conspicuously onesided.

For the novitiate of the Franciscan Order a portion of their friary at Killarney had been set aside. Though there is a distinct Irish branch of the order (which, with truly Celtic bonhomie, has adopted a more humane modification of the Franciscan rule) the English province has had a friary at Killarney for many years. The three enterprising Belgian friars