do so fairly, that things were going on then very much as they are going on now.

When it was first seen that coal had been once vegetable, the question arose, How did all these huge masses of vegetable matter get there? The Yorkshire and Derbyshire coal-fields, I hear, cover seven hundred or eight hundred square miles; the Lancashire is about two hundred. How large the North Wales and the Scotch fields are, I cannot say. But, doubtless, a great deal more coal than can be got at lies under the sea, especially in the north of Wales. Coal probably exists over vast sheets of England and France, buried so deeply under later roeks, that it cannot be reached by mining. As an instance, a distinguished geologist has long held that there are beds of coal under London itself, which rise, owing to a peculiar disturbance of the strata, to within one thousand or twelve hundred feet of the surface; and that we, or our children, may yet see coal-mines in the marshes of the Thames. And more it is a provable fact that only a portion of the coal-measures is left. A great part of Ireland must once have been covered with coal, which is now destroyed. Indeed, it is likely that the coal now known of in Europe and America; is but a remnant of what has existed there in former ages, and has been eaten away by the inroads of the

sea.

Now, whence did all that enormous heap of vegetable soil come? Off some neighboring land was the first and most natural answer. It was a rational one. It proceeded from the known to the unknown. It was clear that these plants had grown on land; for they were land-plants. It was clear that there must have been land close by, for between the beds of coal, as you all know, the rock is principally coarse sandstone, which could only have been laid down (as I have explained to you already) in very shallow

sippi, for instance- vast rafts of dead floating trees accumulated; and that the bottoms of the rivers were often full of snags, &c.; trees which had grounded, and stuck in the mud; and why should not the coal have been formed in the same way?

Because-and this was a serious objection— then surely the coal would be impure- mixed up with mud and sand, till it was not worth burning. Instead of which, the coal is pure vegetable, parted sharply from the sandstone which lies on it. The only other explanation was, that the coal vegetation had grown in the very places where it was found. But that seemed too strange to be true, till that great geologist, Sir W. Logan, who has since done such good work in Canada, - showed that every bed of coal had a bed of clay under it, and that that clay always contained fossils called Stigmaria. Then it came out that the Stigmaria in the under-clay had long filaments attached to them; while, when found in the sandstones or shales, they had lost their filaments, and seemed more or less rolled, in fact, that the natural place of the Stigmaria was in the under-clay. Then Mr. Binney discovered a tree, a Sigillaria, standing upright in the coal-measures, with its roots attached. Those roots penetrated into the under-clay of the coal; and those roots were Stigmarias. That seems to have settled the question. The Sigillarias, at least, had grown where they were found; and the clay beneath the coal-beds was the original soil on which they had grown. Just so, if you will look at any peat-bog, you will find it bottomed by clay, which clay is pierced everywhere by the roots of the moss forming the peat, or of the trees, birches, alders, poplars, willows, which grow in the bog. So the proof seemed complete, that the coal had been formed out of vegetation growing where it was buried. If any further proof for that theory was needed, it would be found in this fact, most ingeniously suggested by Mr. Boyd Dawkins. Those resinous spores of, or seeds of, the Lepidodendra, or trees like our present club-mosses, make up (as said above) a great part of the bituminous coal. Now, those spores are

so light, that they would have floated on water, and have been carried away; and, therefore, the bituminous coal must have been formed, not under water, but on dry land. I have dwelt at length on these further arguments, because they seem to me as pretty a specimen as I can give my readers of that regular and gradual induction, that common-sense regulated, by which geological theories are worked out.

But how does this theory explain the perfect purity of the coal? I think Sir C. Lyell answers that question fully in p. 383 of his "Student's Elements of Geology." He tells us that the dense growth of reeds and herbage which encompass the margins of forest-covered swamps in the valley and delta of the Mississippi, in passing through them, are filtered, and made to clear themselves entirely, before they reach the areas in which vegetable matter may accumulate for centuries, forming coal if the climate be favorable; and that in the cypress-swamps of that region no sediment mingles with the vegetable matter accumu lated from the decay of trees and semi-aquatic plants; so that when, in a very dry season, the swamp is set on fire, pits are burned into the ground many feet deep, or as far as the fire can go down without reaching water, and scarcely any earthy residuum is left; just as when the soil of the English fens catches fire, red-hot holes are eaten down through pure peat till the water-bearing clay below is reached. But the purity of the water in peaty lagoons is observable elsewhere than in the delta of the Mississippi. What can be more transparent than many a pool surrounded by quaking bogs, fringed, as they are in Ireland, with a ring of white water-lilies, which you dare not stoop to pick, lest the peat, bending inward, slide you down into that clear, dark gulf some twenty feet in depth, bottomed and walled with yielding ooze, from which there is no escape? Most transparent, likewise, is the water of the West Indian swamps. Though it is of the color of coffee, or rather of dark beer, and so impregnated with gases that it produces fever or cholera when drunk, yet it is-at least when it does not mingle with the salt waterclear, that one might see every marking on a boa-constrictor or alligator, if he glided along the bottom under the canoe. But now comes the question, Even if all this be true, how were the forests covered up in shale and sandstone, one after another?

By gradual sinking of the land, one would suppose.

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If we find, as we may find in a hundred coalpits, trees rooted as they grew, with their trunks either standing up through the coal, and through the sandstones above the coal; their bark often remaining as coal, while their inside is filled up with sandstone, has not our common-sense a right to say, the land on which they grew sank below the water-line; the trees were killed; and the mud and sand which were brought down the streams enveloped their trunks? As for the inside being full of sandstone, have we not all seen hollow trees? Do we not all know that when a tree dies, its wood decays first, its bark last? It is so, especially in the tropics. There one may see huge dead trees, with their bark seemingly sound, and their inside a mere cavern, with touchwood at the bottom; into which caverns one used to peep with some caution. For, though one might have found inside only a pair of toucans, or parrots, or a whole party of jolly little monkeys, one was quite as likely to find a poisonous snake, four or five feet long, whose bite would have very certainly prevented me having the pleasure of writing this paper.

But is it not plain that if such trees as that sunk, their bark would be turned into lignite, and at last into coal, while their insides would naturally be silted up with mud and sand? Thus a core or pillar of hard sandstone would be formed, which might do to the collier of the future, what they are too apt to do in the Newcastle and Bristol collieries. For there, when the coal is worked out below, the sandstone stems, - "coal-pipes," as the colliers call them, in the roof of the seam, having no branches, and nothing to hold them up but their friable bark of coal, are but too apt to drop out suddenly, killing or wounding the hapless

men below.

Or, again, if we find as we very often find as was found at Parkfield Colliery, near Wolverhampton, in the year 1844 - a quarter of an acre of coal-seam filled with stumps of trees as they grew, their trunks broken off and lying in every direction, turned into coal, and flattened, as coal-fossils so often are, by the weight of the rock above, should we not have a right to say, These trees were snapped off where they grew, by some violent convulsion - a storm, or a sudden inrush of water, owing to a sudden sinking of the land, or by the very earthquake shock itself which sank the land?

But what evidence have we of such sinkings? The plain fact that you have coal-seam above coal-seam, each with its bed of under-clay, and that the land must have sunk, ere the next bed of soil could have been deposited, and the next forest have grown on it.

In one of the Rocky Mountain coal-fields there are more than thirty seams of coal, each with its under-clay below it. What can that mean, but thirty or more subsidences of the land, and the peat of thirty or more forests or peatmosses, one above the other? And now, if any reader shall say, "Subsidence? What is this quite new element which you have brought into your argument? You told us that you would reason from the known to the unknown. What do we know of subsidence? You offered to explain the thing which had gone on once, by that which is going on now. Where is subsidence going on now, upon the surface of our planet? And where, too, upheaval, such as would bring us these buried forests up again from under the sealevel, and make them, like our British coal-field, dry land once more?"

The answer is, subsidence and elevation of the land are common now; probably just as common as they were in any age of this planet's history.

To give two instances, made now notorious by the writings of Sir C. Lyell and other geologists. As lately as 1819, a single earthquake shock in Cutch, at the mouth of the Indus, sunk a tract of land larger than the Lake of Geneva, in some places to a depth of eighteen feet, and converted it into an inland sea. The same shock raised, a few miles off, a corresponding sheet of land some fifty miles in length, and in some parts sixteen miles broad, ten feet above the level of the alluvial plain, and left it to be named by the country-people the "Ullah Bund," or bank of God, to distinguish it from the artificial banks in the neighborhood.

Again, in the valley of the Mississippi, a tract which is now, it would seem, in much the same state as Central England was while our coal-fields were being laid down, the earthquakes of 1811-12 caused large lakes to appear suddenly in many parts of the district, amid dense forests of cypress. One of these, the "Sunk Country," near New Madrid, is between seventy and eighty miles in length, and thirty miles in breadth, and throughout it, as late as 1846, "dead trees were conspicuous; some erect in the water, others fallen, and strewed in dense masses over the bottom, in the shallows, and near the shore." I quote these words from Sir C. Lyell's "Principles of Geology" (11th edit.), vol. i. p. 463. And I cannot do better than advise my readers, if they wish to know more of the way in which coal was formed, to read what is said in that book concerning the delta of the Mississippi, and its strata of forests sunk as they grew, and in some places upraised again, alternating with beds of clay and sand, vegetable soil, recent sea-shells, and what-not; forming, to a depth of several hundred feet, just such a mass of beds as exists in our own coal-fields at this day.

If, therefore, the reader wishes to picture to himself the scenery of what is now Central England, during the period when our coal was being laid down, he has only, I believe, to transport himself in fancy to any great alluvial delta, in a moist and warm climate, favorable to the growth of vegetation. He has only to conceive wooded marshes, at the mouth of great rivers, slowly sinking beneath the sea; the forests in them killed by the water, and then covered up by layers of sand, brought down from inland, till that new layer became dry land, to carry a fresh crop of vegetation. He has thus all that he needs to explain how coal-measures

were formed. I myself saw once a scene of that kind, which I should be sorry to forget; for there was, as I conceived, coal, making, or getting ready to be made, before my eyes; a sheet of swamp sinking slowly into the sea; for there stood trees still rooted below high-water mark, and killed by the waves; while inland, huge trees stood dying, or dead, from the water at their roots. But what a scene! a labyrinth of narrow creeks, so narrow that a canoe could not pass up, haunted with alligators and boa-constrictors, parrots and white herons, amid an inextricable confusion of vegetable mud, roots of the alder-like mangroves, and tangled creepers hanging from tree to tree, and overhead huge fan-palms, delighting in the moisture, mingled with still huger broad-leaved trees in every stage of decay. The drowned vegetable soil of ages beneath me; above my head, for a hundred feet, a mass of stems and boughs and leaves and flowers, compared with which the richest hothouse in England was poor and small. But if the sinking process which was going on continued a few hundred years, all that huge mass of wood and leaf would be sunk beneath the swamp, and covered up in mud washed down from the mountains, and sand driven in from the sea to form a bed, many feet thick, of what would be first peat, then lignite, and last, it may be, coal, with the stems of killed trees standing up out of it into the new mud and sand-beds above it; just as the Sigillaria and other stems stand up in the coal-beds both of Britain and of Nova Scotia, while over it a fresh forest would grow up, to suffer the same fate-if the sinking process went on — as that which had preceded

it.

That was a sight not easily to be forgotten. But we need not have gone so far from home, at least, a few hundred years ago, to see an exactly similar one. The fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, before the rivers were embanked, the water pumped off, the forests felled, and the reed-beds ploughed up, were exactly in the same state. The vast deposits of peat between Cambridge and the sea, often filled with timber trees, either fallen, or upright as they grew, and often mixed with beds of sand or mud, brought down in floods, were formed in exactly the same way; and if they had remained undrained, then that slow sinking, which geologists say is going on over the whole area of the fens, would have brought them gradually, but surely, below the sea-level, to be covered up by new forests, and converted in due time into coal. And future geologists would have found - they may find yet, if, which God forbid, England should become barbarous and the trees be thrown out of cultivation - instead of fossil Lepidodendra and Sigillariæ, Calamites and ferns, fossil ashes and oaks, alders and poplars, bulrushes and reeds. Almost the only fossil fern would be that tall and beautiful Lastroa Thelypteris, once so abundant, now all but destroyed by drainage and the plough.

We need not, therefore, fancy any extraordinary state of things on this planet while our English coal was being formed. The climate of the northern hemisphere-Britain, at least, and Nova Scotia was warmer than now, to judge from the abundance of ferns, and especially of treeferns; but not so warm, to judge from the presence of conifers (trees of the pine tribe), as the tropics. Moreover, there must have been, it seems to me, a great scarcity of animal life. Insects are found, beautifully preserved; a few reptiles, too, and land-shells; but how few! And where are the traces of such a swarming life as would be entombed were a tropic forest now sunk; which is found entombed in many parts of our English fens? The only explanation which I can offer is this: that the club-mosses, tree-ferns, pines, and other low-ranked vegetation of the coal, afforded little or no food for animals, as the same families of plants do to this day; and if creatures can get nothing to eat, they certainly cannot multiply and replenish the earth. But, be that as it may, the fact that coal is buried forest is not affected.

Meanwhile, the shape and arrangements of sea and land must have been utterly different from what they are now. Where was that great land, off which great rivers ran to deposit our coal-measures in their deltas? It has been supposed, for good reasons, that North-western France, Bel

gium, Holland, and Germany were then under the sea; that Denmark and Norway were joined to Scotland by a continent, a tongue of which ran across the centre of England, and into Ireland, dividing the northern and southern coalfields. But how far to the west and north did that old continent stretch? Did it, as it almost certainly did long ages afterwards, join Greenland and North America with Scotland and Norway? Were the northern fields of Nova Scotia, which are of the same geological age as our own, and containing the same plants, laid down by rivers which ran off the same continent as ours? Who can tell, now? That old land, and all record of it, save what these fragmentary coal-measures can give, are buried in the dark abyss of countless ages; and we can only look back with awe, and comfort ourselves with the thought, let time be ever so vast, yet time is not eternity.

One word more. If my readers have granted that all for which I have argued is probable, they will still have a right to ask for further proof.

They will be justified in saying, "You say that coal is transformed vegetable matter; but can you show us how the transformation takes place? Is it possible, according to known natural laws?"

The chemist must answer that. And he tells us that wood can become lignite, or wood-coal, by parting with its oxygen, in the shape of carbonic acid gas, or choke-damp; and then common or bituminous coal by parting with its hydrogen, chiefly in the form of carburetted hydrogen, - the gas with which we light our streets. That is about as much as the unscientific reader need know. But it is a fresh corroboration of the theory that coal has been once vegetable fibre, for it shows how vegetable fibre can, by the laws of nature, become coal. And it certainly helps us to believe that a thing has been done, if we are shown that it can be

done.

This fact explains, also, why in mines of wood-coal carbonic acid, i. e., choke-damp, alone is given off. For in the wood-coal a great deal of the hydrogen still remains. But in mines of true coal, not only is choke-damp given off, but that more terrible pest of the miners, fire-damp, or explosive carburetted hydrogen and olefiant gases. Now, the occurrence of that fire-damp in mines proves that changes are still going on in the coal; that it is getting rid of its bydrogen, and so progressing toward the state of anthracite or culm, stone-coal, as it is sometimes called. In the Pennsylvanian coal-fields, some of the coal has actually done this, under the disturbing force of earthquakes; for the coal, which is bituminous, like our common coal, to the westward where the strata are horizontal, becomes gradually anthracite, as it is tossed and torn by the earthquake faults of the Alleghany and Appalachian mountains.

And is a further transformation possible? Yes: and more than one. If we conceive the anthracite cleared of all but its last atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, till it has become all but pure carbon, it would become as it has become in certain rocks of immense antiquity, graphite, what we miscall black lead. And, after that, it might go through one transformation more, and that the most startling of all. It would need only perfect purification and crystallization to become a diamond; nothing less. We may consider the coal upon the fire as the middle term of a series, of which the first is live wood, and the last diamond; and indulge safely in the fancy that every diamond in the world has, probably at some remote epoch, formed part of a growing plant. A strange transformation, which will look to us more strange, more truly poetical, the more steadily we consider it.

what

The coal on the fire; the table at which I write, are they made of? Gas and sunbeams, with a small percentage of ash, or earthy salts, which need hardly be taken into account.

Gas and sunbeams. Strange, but true.

The life of the growing plant- and what that life is, who can tell ?— laid hold of the gases in the air and in the soil, of the carbonic acid, the atmospheric air, the water; for that, too, is gas. It drank them in through its rootlets; it breathed them in through its leaf-pores, that it might distil them into

sap and bud and leaf and wood. But it had to take in another element, without which the distillation and the shaping could never have taken place. It had to drink in the sunbeams, that mysterious and complex force which is forever pouring from the sun, and making itself partly palpable to our senses as heat and light. So the life of the plant seized the sunbeams, and absorbed them; buried them in itself, -no longer as light and heat, but as invisible chemical force, locked up for ages in that woody fibre. So it is. Lord Lytton told us long ago, in a beautiful song, how

"The Wind and the Beam loved the Rosc."

But nature's poetry was more beautiful than man's. The wind and the beam loved the rose so well that they made the rose, or rather the rose took the wind and the beam, and built up out of them, by her own inner life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance.

What next? The rose dies; the timber-tree dies, decays down into vegetable fibre, is buried, and turned to coal; but the plant cannot altogether undo its own work. Even in death and decay it cannot set free the sunbeams imprisoned in its tissue. The sun-force must stay shut up, age after age, invisible, but strong; working at its own prison-cells; transmuting them, or making them capable of being transmuted by man, into the manifold products of coal,coke, petroleum, mineral pitch, gases, coal-tar, benzole, delicate aniline dyes, and what-not, till its day of deliverance comes.

Man digs it, throws it on the fire, a black, dead-seeming lump. A corner, an atom of it, warms till it reaches the igniting point; the temperature at which it is able to combine with oxygen.

And then, like a dormant live thing, awaking after ages to the sense of its own powers, its own needs, the whole lump is seized, atom after atom, with an infectious hunger for that oxygen which it lost, centuries since, in the bosom of the earth. It drinks the oxygen in at every pore, and

burns.

IN the heart of the desolate Campine stands one of the more modern houses, founded by that most remarkable of Christian monastic orders, the Order of La Trappe. Situated midway between Antwerp and Turnhout, it is named the monastery of La Trappe, Westmael; to distinguish it, first, from the Norman foundation; and, secondly, from all the other silent sister-communities that have been planted, within the last two hundred years, far and wide over the world, in American backwoods, as, recently, in Algeria, under the auspices of the ex-Emperor, and in the Roman Campagna, after special invitation by the Pope, and each of which bears a special, as well as the general, name.

I propose giving some description of the life led by these Westmael (and therefore by all Trapp st) monks; and of the locality in which, as if in "a sheltered nook in the stormy hill-side of the world," they chant their hymns, and till their fields, in culpably contemptuous indifference to the De Becker politics, and still graver concerns, of their Belgian fellow-mortals. Even the slightest correct sketch of this cloistral life would have its interest. For, if monasticism be what its emotional advocate calls it, "the definite form of Christian life," the Trappists are living the most definite form of all. They show us monasticism at its best.

But, for a fair understanding of our contemporary ascetics, it will be advisable to give at least an outline of the story of the founder himself, the renowned Abbot Rancé, who, again, was one in a series of reformers. A few brief sentences must suffice for the period before Rancé's time.

By anachronism, St. Benedict may be styled the first Trappist. Westmael, Chimey, Fourges, are but latest editions of the monastery which he founded, at Monte Cassino, more than twelve hundred years ago. Undoubtedly his time favored those feelings and notions which have sometimes impelled even the noblest minds to flee to the cloister from the evil in the world, rather than manfully battle with it, side by side with men their brothers. The spectacle of moral dissolution - in the State, of selfish luxury and evil passions, which left the Empire a prey of a worthier race, the "barbarous Teuton;" and in the Church, of universal, bitter strife over futile dogma-convinced the fugitives of Monte Cassino that this world is but "a vain show," that evil is triumphant, and that the sole purpose of a Christian man's life ought to be the rescue of his own particular soul from the general muddle. And, indeed, it was enough to make the devils laugh, that Gothic kingdoms, and fighting hordes of illiterate Vandals, should be classed according to their views on the Arian heresy. St. Benedict "protested;" though not after the Oriental manner, "cross-legged and staring foolishly atop of his pillar." Meditation and prayer were, of course, the main business of a Benedictine monk: "Is it not," said the founder, "for the amendment of our sins that the days of our life are prolonged like a dream?" But," said he also, "laziness is the enemy of the soul;" and he set apart for manual labor, in field or workshop, the seven hours which remained after seven had been apportioned to religious service, four to study and contemplation, and six to meals and sleep. The slender wants of the community being first satisfied, the surplus produce was to be sold under current prices, or given to the poor, gratis. No monk was to "possess any thing, however much his labors might have increased the wealth of the monastery to which he had, forevermore, surrendered his individuality. His food was a bare sufficiency of bread, milk, vegetables, and water. He was specially enjoined to practise the virtue of hospitality: "Is it not Christ who shall one day say to us, I was a stranger, and ye took me in'?" This is why our friend, the Westmael janitor, falls on his knees before the visitor who seeks his hospitality, he recognizes in him the person of Christ. After four centuries the Order had grown very rich. But a pauper community rolling in wealth was too much even for cloistral human nature. So the monks gave way; and hardly in any Benedictine monastery in Europe remains there a trace of the old religious life.

66

At last came Robert of Molesme. He began his work of reform in the middle of the eleventh century. But his monks feared neither God nor man. Sick of him and his remonstrances, they ended by driving him away. But twenty-one of them followed him to his retreat, near Citeaux, where were only swamps, woods, bears, and wolves. There they founded the first monastery of the Cistercian Order, whose "rule," framed by St. Stephen, second abbot, was almost wholly a restoration of the primitive rule of St. Benedict. The Cistercians spread rapidly, and in less than a century nearly twelve hundred of their establishments were scattered over France, Germany, England, Ireland, Denmark, and Scandinavia. Among these was the Norman house of La Trappe, founded in the middle of the twelfth century, under the auspices of the greatest of the order and most notable man of his time, Bernard of Clairvaux, who was then preaching Europe into its second Crus'e. Redeunt Saturnia regna. The monks again grew wealthy, then lazy and fat, and in every way vicious; so that, long before the seventeenth century, there was not a spark of moral or religious life left in them.

In the race to perdition, the monks of La Trappe had well out-stripped their brothers of the cloister, which is saying a great deal. Robert of Molesme, could he have

returned to earth, would have opened his eyes in amazement at any Trappist calling himself a monk. For, in the olden time, the Cistercian had gone about in black scapulary, white gown with rope girdle, and shoes of roughlywhittled wood; and he looked like his low diet. But that stout, florid, muddle-eyed fellow there, with hunting-coat for gown, and jack-boots for sandals, and shot-bag where his beads ought to be, who could take him for a Cistercian, and call him mon père? Particularly if the holy "father" should cock his pistol and say, "Thy money or thy life." The Trappist monks were noted for their exploits in this way; and it was by reason of their Dick Turpin weakness that the Norman peasantry always spoke of them as the "banditti of La Trappe." Nor few, is it said, were the murders committed by these reverend prowlers in the quiet of their woods, and when they ought to have been assisting each other at mass. But the poor men were sheep without a shepherd. Their lord the abbot they had never seen. His business was to pocket his emoluments; to intrust Dominus Prior with the misconduct of affairs; and to amuse himself also, after a wild fashion, in the gay city of Paris, with his fiddles, and his women, and his wine.

This "commendatory," though not commendable, abbot was Jean Armand de Bouthillier de Rancé, born in 1625; one of the wealthiest, handsomest, cleverest, most learned, luxurious, and rising young men in Paris and France. His preferments had commenced early. At the mature age of ten he was made a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame; after which, benefices, many and fat, continued to be heaped upon him, for he had many friends at court, among them his own godfather, Richelieu, and Mary of Medicis. Evidently this brilliant courtier was about the last man whom "society" would expect to hide his head despairingly in a cowl at the early age of thirty-six, and so absurdly long before age had incapacitated him for further dissipation. The motifs véritables of his conversion were curiously discussed at the time, and variously ascribed to disappointed ambition, love, and a narrow escape from death. But the main cause lay in those natural gifts which have universally been attributed to him, "vigorous intellect, delicacy of taste, acute sensibility, and noble, and generous passion,' -qualities not needful for a mere man about town, but likely to find vent in some downright, earnest, even if mistaken, purpose; so that Rancé, if he become a monk at all, will, to a certainty, revel in the luxury of hardship and self-denial as already in the luxury of self-indulgence. Austerity will become the poetry and passion of his life.

The immediate cause of Rancé's retirement from court was a quarrel between himself and Mazarin. He betook himself to his rich and lovely estate of Veret, in Touraine, where he pleasantly read books, shot game, flirted, and talked atheism. It is told of him how, one day, when on a hunting-trip with a friend, he horrified the latter by laughing at the belief in a Providence; and how, as if meaning "What!" Rancé's gun "coughed," and discharged its leaden bullets, not into its owner's vitals, but, "providentially," against his steel powder-flask. "He was very silent and thoughtful all the rest of the way," adds a biographer. Then follows a story, which has, however, in some of its details, been contradicted more or less. Towards evening he arrived at the residence of a lady whom he uncanonically loved, and with whom, surely, he might laugh over that gun-barrel episode. But the house was strangely silent; and on entering her apartment he saw Madame la Duchesse dead and coffined, not beautiful in death. Remorse and despair made Rancé their sport. Often, it is said, he wandered alone in the woods, calling aloud on the name of the lost one. Then came fits of gloom, and study of occult books, whereby he hoped to recall her spirit. And lastly, study of his Bible, -a book which, to Rancé, as to many another reverend dignitary, was as occult as Zadkiel - with calmer retrospect of his life, and acquies cence in his fate, and farewell to the world's vain show, andceaseless penitence as his chief duty. So he sold his possessions, resigned his benefices, went away to his lonely monastery of La Trappe, and took it and its morals in

is to you,

hand.

Their lord the abbot was unquestionably the most unwelcome visitor with whom the good fathers ever had dealt, fairly or foully. How first they laughed, then stamped and swore, at the new regulations ! What! no more haunch of venison, not even plain beef and mutton, no flesh meat of any sort, and no more—. Sacré nom de-, no liquor but water, nor any victuals but dry bread, cabbage, and carrots! And no monk shall henceforth gallop across country, or handle a gun! Rather than submit, these worthy Cistercians would dismiss their abbot to purgatory. Only how to do it in a safe way? for their superior was a man of European fame. So, many plots were contrived to poison, to waylay, and assassinate him. One night he was fired at, without resalt, by somebody somewhere in the dark. But Rancé was at once cautious and fearless. He was armed, too, with gentle forbearance, resolute will, and force of example. Two years passed away, and those ruffians were tamed. The father who missed his shot became learned and pious, and subprior of the monastery. This, however, was but a solitary instance of the changes wrought there by the magic influence of the abbot. The histories of the lives of some of these Trappists read like strange romances. But the most strange was of the once gay, pleasure-loving, much-courted scholar and Parisian man of fashion, who, in his prime, became the successor of St. Benedict and Robert of Molesme, and for thirty-three long years lived as if by sheer fervor of austerity, until his hour had come, when his monks, “banditti of La Trappe," like shrouded messengers of death, gathering around him, as he lay on the floor on a few handfuls of ashes, briefly muttering a last blessingsilently stood there with no visible sign of grief, witnessing, in that death-scene, their beloved abbot's greatest triumph over the world and the flesh, and the shadow of what would come for each and all.

once

And now for our Belgian monastery. First, of its whereabouts. The Campine, in which it stands, is the barrenest and dreariest part of all Belgium. Hence its sole industry of broom-making, for which there are, in all conscience, abundant materials. The Government is only too glad to part with the soil, not merely at any price, but at no price at all; on this condition, however, that the portions allotted be cultivated. A very few years ago, as much as three hundred thousand acres of it were to be had for the asking. But still the number of occupiers is very small; and even these have enough to do to scrape a bare subsistence from the sandy soil. Place and people are, of course, much behind the age; that primitive contrivance, the deligence, doing for them the work of railways and telegraphs. The vehicle that went rumbling with us, on a fine morning of last autumn, over the Borgerhout Steenweg, Antwerp, was a remarkable specimen of antiquity: a capacious structure, shaped like a furniture van, or a mourning coach with the feathers off; divided into separate compartments for inside passengers; with low bulwarks atop for the safety of the cargo, or of any traveller venturous enough to climb thither; with a seat in front, on which three others might find room beside a driver, who was laconic and melancholy, as if the daily journey across the desert had told on his spirits and constitution; and the whole concern dragged along by a pair of horses harnessed with ropes, - for, as the man sagely observed, when a rope snaps, you can easily knot it; but you can't do that with leather. But how the rottenest of leather traces could break under strain of the sleepy trot of such cattle, was not easy to understand. Perhaps the precaution was necessitated by the villanous paving of the roadway. For the Steenweg is not a mere street of Antwerp, ending with the imposing fortifications of that city, but a stoneway, extending for miles beyond, or, rather, it ramifies, under sundry aliases, over the whole Belgian kingdom. The occasional plungings and lurchings of this travelling van, over the ruts and small bowlders of the Steenweg, are apt to remind one of a roughish journey by sea, and to set one a-guessing the reason why Frenchspeaking people talk of a man on a land trip as being en voyage. The three-hours' journey is, however, far from unpleasant, if you go in the summer time, when even the Campine smiles and seems glad at heart, and if you sit on

- con

the roof. Here there is no seat, but always a heterogeneous assemblage of baskets, boxes, and hampers; so that any man, with a grain of invention, need not be at a loss how to improvise an arm-chair. Of course, there are certain precautions to be taken; for otherwise your experiment might end in a squash of butter-pats and egg-shells, and even in the death of innocent poultry. Cosily seated as described, and in luxuriously lazy mood, we find the hours pass away like a pleasant dream; of green Antwerp ramparts, spicuously atop of them a small parti-colored, wasp-wasted warrior, with hips a yard wide, proudly stalking among his cannons, and bearing aslant on his shoulder his glittering "butchering tool;" and at bottom of them the still water of the moat, over the edge of which dangle the legs of another warrior off duty, and amusing himself with a fishing-rod of that long and straight canal line, over a wooden bridge of which the diligence passes so leisurely that we get a full view of the splendid water-way that is still as the cloudless blue above, and ever recedes with its double fringes of trees and shadow trees, until they and it vanish in the sunlight of scattered homesteads, with brownskinned peasants at work: of some red-cheeked Flemish urchin, seated in his doorway, and, like a rising Teufelsdröckh, contemplating our vehicle, which, like "a twohorsed monstrous shuttle," passes and repasses him regularly every day of the Campine itself, growing ever drearier, with its trees, which get fewer and more dwarfed the farther we proceed, and with its miles of sand, spotted over with patches of dry, spiky grass, and dark copses of underwood: and lastly of two or three windmills that stand high up on the horizon, motionless, looking like giant sentries with arms outstretched in a drowsy yawn.

:

Almost reluctantly we descend from our lofty perch, and turn off into the long grassy pathway leading to the monastery. In three minutes I find myself in the Middle Ages. A few yards on the other side of the hedge two monks are carting hay; the one tossing it aloft with his pitchfork, the other pressing it down as it falls about his feet. A queer pair of laborers they look, with their shaven crowns, and dark frocks with triangular hoods to them; especially the one on the hay-load, with his gown tucked up, and who wonderfully resembles a Scotch woman, stamping blankets in her washing-tub. Farther on, a white-robed "father," his hands clasped behind his back, walks about among the beeches and firs of a little wood, into which you may enter with a step from the pathway. A dreamy little spot it is, this refuge of silence and shadows, and grateful to a jaded Londoner as to any mooning modern man of the twelfth century.

At the right-hand side of the gateway hangs a rusty chain, ending in a rusty stirrup-shaped appendage. Reasoning inductively, you give it a tug, and bell-notes that seem to have a cloistral ring in them both prove your sagacity, and make you feel as if you had done something out of the way. The sharp clink of sabots announces the approach of the janitor, an old man, if we may judge from his short, shuffling step; then you hear him manœuvre with his apparatus of bolts and bars, and presently a dumpy old man, with fat, smiling face, and long, hooked nose, and bald crown and bushy beard, and tucked-up frock, and bunch of variously shaped and sized keys, that jingle at his waist, and seem to bend him double with their weight, confronts you, and waits to know the purport of your visit. Hospitality from the Trappist Monks, of course. Whereupon you are kindly invited to enter; and when the big door has closed behind you, the aged frère kneels before you on the rough stones of the archway; for you are sacred in his eyes, for the sake of Him who said, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." For simplicity, and graceful fitness of expression, and touching mark of affectionate remembrance, there is no such symbolic rite of the Christian Church. After some interchange of small talk, the janitor is one of the few monks who, in virtue of their special office, may use ordinary speech,- -we enter the hall of the monastery, and are consigned to the care of the père hôtelier. We should, perhaps, here observe, that the frère is one who