A Child's Book of Saints

by William Canton

To and fro in the open cloister of Essalona walked the monk Desiderius, musing and musing. Every now and again he stayed in his paces to feed a tall white stork and two of her young, which stood on the parapet between the pillars of the cloister; and though for the most part his dole went to the storklings, the mother was well content with his stroking of her head and soft white backfeathers.

Then he resumed his slow walk, turning over and over in his perplexed mind the questions of grace and nature, and praying for light in the obscure ways where reason groped darkling. Meanwhile the storks stood grave and patient, as if they too had matter for deep musing.

As in this day, so in the ancient time the convent of Essalona was perched on a beetling crag on the northern side of the Sarras mountains. There the mighty ridge, with its belts of virgin pinewood and its stony knolls and pastoral glens, breaks off suddenly in a precipitous escarpment; and, a thousand feet below, the land is an immense green plain, sweeping away to the blue limits of the north. It is as though the sea had once on a time run up to the mountain wall and torn down the tawny rocks for sand and shingle, and had then drawn back into the north, leaving the good acres to grow green in the sun. Through the plain winds a river, bright and slow; in many places the fruitful level is ruffled with thicket and coppice; and among the far fields the white walls of farms and hamlets glitter amid their boskage. When the clear sunlight fell on that still expanse of quiet earth, one might see, in those days, the stone towers and sparkling pinnacles of the royal city of Sarras, with a soft blue feather of smoke floating over it.

Often had Desiderius let his eyes rest on the smoulder and gleam of that busy city, which was all so hushed and dreamlike in the distance, little thinking the while that one day he should dwell within its walls, and play a strange part in the deeds that men remember.

From the brink of the escarpment rises the rock of Essalona, and the convent is built on the edge of the rock, in such sort that, leaning over the parapet of the open cloister, Desiderius might have dropped a pebble sheer down to the plain below. A single path wound up the rock to the gate, so narrow and steep that one sturdy lay-brother might have held the way with a thresher's flail against a score of men-at-arms.

King Orgulous

Here, then, in this solitary house, Desiderius dwelt with five other brethren, all good and faithful men; but he, the youngest and yet the most learned in philosophy and star-lore and the sacred Scriptures and the books of the wise, was the most meek and lowly of heart. No pains did he spare his body or his spirit to master the deep knowledge of divine things. Diligent by day, he eked out the light of the stars with the lamp of the firefly, or conned his page by the dim shining of the glow-worm along the lines.

Now as he mused in the cloister he stopped short with a deep sigh, and stood before the storks, and said: "Away, happy birds; you have leave. Disport yourselves, soaring very high in the sunny heavens, or take your rest on our roofs. I have appeased you with food; but to the hunger of my soul who shall minister?"