Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/43

Rh shuffling gait to the entire composition. Happily we found that the teratological department of the convent ended with these two.

Our novice-master or ‘Instructor’ at that time was an excellent and much esteemed friar of six-and-twenty years; we were soon convinced of his kindness, consideration, and religious sincerity, and accepted willingly the intimate relations with him in which our position placed us. The superior of the monastery likewise had no difficulty in securing our esteem. He was a kindly, generous, and upright man, but without a touch of asceticism. Tall and very stout, with dark twinkling eyes and full features, he was a real ‘Friar of Orders Grey’ of the good old times. He was a Belgian, but he had attained wide popularity in Kerry by acquiring a good Flemish parody of an Irish brogue, and constructing a genealogical tree in which some safely remote ancestor was shown to be Irish. His ideal of life was not heroic, but he acted up to it conscientiously; he was genuinely pious in church, fulminatory in pulpit and confessional, kind and familiar with the poor and sick, generous and a moderate disciplinarian in his convent.

A few lay-brothers and four other priests made up the rest of the community. There was a cultured and refined young friar, who, after a few years of perverse misunderstanding and petty persecution from his less sympathetic brethren, was happily rescued from his position by the hand of death. A