towers o’ertopping the elms for a background to the view, there is a conservatory filled with floral beauties, to whom the Agreeable Monk makes himself as benevolently amiable as though he were the Lady of the Sensitive Plant.
What a charming snuggery it is, lacking nothing but a wife to make it perfect; though, if the hundred tongues of Rumour speak the truth (and, for a wonder, they are unanimous on this point), an Eve is soon to appear in this Paradise, and the Monk will have to break his celibate vow. There is room for her at any rate; for are there not two sitting-rooms downstairs, and two bed-rooms with dressing-rooms upstairs? so let her come, and welcome; and as for the future, (as Horace says) don’t ask what fate is going to bestow upon you. At present, the Agreeable Monk’s nursery is in his garden.
As for domestic arrangements,—besides a boy in buttons, of preternatural sharpness, who is his own peculiar slavey,—there are male and female servants to obey his wants, in common with those of his five other companions who may happen to be “in residence.” Their homes all lie in these cloistered courts, and they form a corporation of their own, as the aforesaid jocose prebendary observed, when he directed attention to the increasing rotundity in the form of one of the reverend gentlemen; and they have their own lands and properties, and are mighty big folk accordingly.
My Agreeable Monk—in anticipation, I suppose, of the coming change in his condition,—has thought fit to convert a room, on the opposite side of the cloistered quad, into a kitchen, that is as unlike to an ordinary kitchen as the Agreeable Monk is to an anchorite of old. For, besides its mullioned windows and carved stone fire-place, its walls are curiously ornamented like a parquetted floor, while the floor itself is laid with encaustic tiles. Not that there is any urgent need for this glorified kitchen; for is there not the great kitchen common to the six cloistered monks, from whence, at the word of command, as with the waving of a magic wand, all the wonders of cookery will arise. But my Agreeable Monk likes to do things on the grand seigneur scale; and, I daresay, when dinner-time comes, instead of letting us enjoy our tête-a-tête in that snug dining-room of his (whose only offensive decoration is that too-popular print of the Three Impossible Choristers—their appearance here to be excused on the ground of association and sublimation of ideas), he will haul me up to the other end of the cloisters, up the grand staircase, and into the great dining-hall (in which, to quote the jocose prebendary, he and his corporation have a vested interest), where I shall not be surprised to find covers laid for a score. Nor shall I wonder if, later in the evening, we adjourn to the music-room, where, arrayed in awful state in the orchestra, he and his confrères will fiddle me either into Elysium or into the land of Nod.
How, as I lounge in a luxurious chair in that light, and pleasant, and thoroughly liveable room of his—how I marvel at the Agreeable Monk, as he roves from sweet to sweet of his charming home,—now mounting his music-stool to play ponderous Gregorians, or heathenish waltzes,—now exhibiting, with a collector’s gusto, a rare black-letter, or choice Caxton,—now darting into his garden to remove a snail from the Duchess of Sutherland, or some withered leaves from the Souvenir de Malmaison,—now taking me up-stairs to his workshop, amid the big beams of the high-pitched roof, where he has a lathe and all other carpenter’s tools, and where he saws me out a shield, and turns me a tobacco-stopper, while I note the Rembrandt effect of the sunbeams streaming through the narrow mullions of the dormer windows, and barely lighting the odd lumber of the quaint room.
By-and-by I am carried off to the coach-houses and stables, where an episcopal-looking cob whinnies a How-d’ye-do, and a Dandie Dinmont rushes at us with frantic caresses. Then, Dandie Dinmont leading the way, we pass on to the fruit and kitchen-garden, sloping down to the river’s edge, where the centre walk terminates in a flight of steps descending to the water. Moored close beside the steps is what is called by the poets “a light shallop,” but by mortals a pleasure boat, into which Dandie jumps and we step; and, presently, cool and comfortable in his shirt sleeves, the Agreeable Monk is pulling me up the stream,—I steering, and Dandie keeping a sharp look-out a-head. So, up the river for a mile or so, and then turn, dropping quietly down with the stream,—the rich meadows on either hand, with cattle, and clumps of trees,—and before us the quaint old city, with its bridges and cathedral towers. And while we gaze, the bells begin to softly chime for afternoon prayer; and so, we moor the boat, and stable Dandie.
Ere the last vibrations of the chimes have quivered upon the ripples of the air, the surplice of the Agreeable Monk has fluttered through the private cloister that connects his own quad with the southern transept of the cathedral, and he is in his own proper stall, and I not far distant. Then I hear once more that grand Service, that, daily for centuries, has led the worship of God in one long song of most triumphant praise. Then we return through the private cloister, and linger in its cool precincts to note its old oak roof, whose beams are so curiously carved with birds, and beasts, and fishes, and Noah going into the ark, and Joseph’s dream of the sheaves, and the spies bearing the fruit of the Promised Land. The next morning I hear the cathedral service again, but from a novel quarter—the room over the north transept.
It is a large and lofty room; so large, that it covers the whole of the spacious transept; so lofty, that its groined roof is high enough for a church. It has but two windows at its north end; it is true that they are very large windows, but their glass quarries are encrusted with a century’s accumulation of dirt and cobwebs; and, therefore the light that struggles through them is certainly dim, and may possibly be religious also.
Scattered around the room, are cases and chests, clamped and bound with iron, and profusely padlocked: they are outwardly covered with dust, and inwardly crammed with ancient deeds and