"How many lady prioresses did you ever know?" asked Mistress Davis.
"Philippa would say I am not like her notion of what a lady prioress should be, I suppose!" said Margaret. "But tell us of this good friend of yours, Mistress Loveday, if you will. I have always been curious about convent life."
"I don't know where to begin," said I.
"Oh, begin at the beginning and tell us how you spent your day. What was the first thing in the morning?"
So I began and told—as we say in the west country—for an hour. The elder children were at home by this time, and they also gathered round to hear. When I had finished—
"You seem to have led quiet, peaceful lives enow," observed Margaret; "but I should think such an unvarying life would have been rather wearisome, and that a person leading it on for years would be almost childish. Did you never have any study?"
"I used to do my Latin lessons with poor Sister Denys, and afterward with Father Austin," said I; "but we never read any thing but the Imitation and some lives of saints. I began Cæsar's Commentaries when I studied with Father Austin, but I never got on very far."
"You shall finish it with me if you will," said Margaret. "And we will also have some poetry. Latin is a noble tongue."
"Yes, a tongue more fit for the Scriptures and the church service than common English!" said Philippa.
"But Latin was also the vulgar tongue of the Romans, wasn't it, Sister Margaret?" asked one of the boys. "That is the reason the Latin Bible is called the Vulgate, so our master said. He said St. Jerome put it in Latin that every one might read it."