Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/90

84 diplomatic and ambitious higher superior, our diet and clothing became painfully appropriate to our profession of mendicancy; his parsimony and real scarcity of money were neatly concealed behind a cheerful profession and praise of ‘holy poverty’ before which all complaint was stultified. However, our congregation increased, and the income of the church ran up, so that ‘holy poverty’ was laid aside in favour of more humane sentiments. Our diet became generous and substantial, our beer and wine more expensive, a heating apparatus was introduced; we almost attained the ordinary level of modern monastic life, and our handsome and comfortable monastery became a significant contrast to the dilapidated cow-shed which had been the first home of the order.

Still the life was extremely insanitary, and there was much sickness amongst us. During three years we lost six of our young men, and almost all of us entered upon our active career with deeply impaired constitutions. Our medical attendant waged a constant but fruitless war with our superiors to procure a saner recreation for us; at his demand for exercise we were furnished with picks and shovels and turned into our garden. One huge mound of earth afforded us exercise for four years; one superior desired to see it in a central heap, his successor fancied it in the form of a Roman camp, and a third directed us to form an intrenchment along the side of the garden with it. But the root of the evil was far deeper than they cared to