Where good St Rule his holy lay,
From midnight to the dawn of day,
Sang to the billows’ sound;
and mentions that on one side of the cave there still remained a sort of stone altar. The Aberdeen Breviary states that St Gernadius, who settled at Kennedor, in Moray, lived in a cell partly natural, but artificially adapted for a habitation, in which he was wont to repose his wearied limbs on a bed of stone. His cave in the neighbourhood of Lossiemouth is distinguished by the holy well close beside it, which had a local reputation until quite recently, and is still known as St Gerardine’s Well. St Baldred of the Bass, who sat upon the rock in Aldhame Bay, and caused it to transport itself out of the fairway, had his cave also in the cliff opposite this rock; and traces have been found both upon the rock itself and in the cave of a long-continued occupation at a remote period.
Although the materials for the illustration of this long-forgotten phase of ecclesiastical life are so few and fragmentary, they suffice to reveal the presence in these early ages of a passionate fervour of devotion and a child-like simplicity of faith to which we are altogether strangers in these times. The systems and institutions by which they were created and fostered ‘are productions of old ages, not to be repeated in the new: they presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to.’
BY MEAD AND STREAM.
CHAPTER XLII.—A LAND SHIPWRECK.
To be unhappy and alone at night in chambers is to have an opportunity of realising the sense of desolation in its bitterest degree. The double doors and double windows which secure the stillness that is of so much importance for working purposes, seem now to shut you off doubly from the world; from help if you are dying, and from sympathy if you live. The rumble of the heaviest wagon reaches the ears as a faint sound from afar off; no footstep is heard at all; and the adjacent chambers are silent as the tenements of the dead. You welcome the plash of rain against the window-panes—dull as that is—as if it were a friend come to speak to you in your solitude.
That is the time for thoughts of suicide to haunt a man if his mind is disturbed; and that is the time for cynical broodings on the vanity of life, the falsehood of friendship, and the fickleness of love. He sees in what miserable failure his most earnest efforts have resulted; he misinterprets the most trivial word and look of his friend, and he loses grip altogether of that faith which in healthier state enables him to find consolation in love. He recalls all the bitter things that have been written about women, and for the time-being believes them.
How was it, Philip asked himself, that he had fallen into this desperate position? He had laboured with all his might for others rather than for himself; his object was a noble one, and quite feasible, he was still convinced. Yet the social revolution he had dreamed of was as far off as ever, and he suddenly found that he was face to face with absolute ruin. Evidently his blunder lay in his miscalculation of the power of his capital. There had been disappointments with his fellow-workers, who, shrewdly counting the cost of material and the market value of the manufactured article, saw that the latter would barely realise enough to give them a fair ordinary wage in the best of times, to say nothing of the share of profits promised them. The cost of material was too high; and it was natural that they should conclude the cost was so fixed by arrangement with their chief in order to deprive them of what they now called their rights.