my admission.  However, he urged me to stay on for the present as a guest, an invitation which I accepted without hesitation.  He had only just time to show me my cell and the card of rules for guests when a bell rang and, drawing his cowl over his head, he hurried off.

After perusing the rules, I discovered that this was the bell which rings a quarter of an hour before Vespers for solemn silence.  I hadn’t the slightest idea where the chapel was, and when I asked Brother Lawrence he glared at me and put his finger to his mouth.  I was not to be discouraged, however, and in the end he showed me into the ante-chapel which is curtained off from the quire.  There was only one other person in the ante-chapel, a florid, well-dressed man with a rather mincing and fussy way of worshipping.  The monks led by Brother Lawrence (who is not even a novice yet, but a postulant and wears a black habit, without a hood, tied round the waist with a rope) passed from the refectory through the ante-chapel into the quire, and Vespers began.  They used an arrangement called “The Day Hours of the English Church,” but beyond a few extra antiphons there was very little difference from ordinary Evening Prayer.  After Vespers I had a simple and solemn meal by myself, and I was wondering how I should get hold of a book to pass away the evening, when Brother Dunstan came in and asked me if I’d like to sit with the brethren in the library until the bell rang for simple silence a quarter of an hour before Compline at 9.15, after which everybody—­guests and monks—­are expected to go to bed in solemn silence.  The difference between simple silence and solemn silence is that you may ask necessary questions and get necessary replies during simple silence; but as far as I can make out, during solemn silence you wouldn’t be allowed to tell anybody that you were dying, or if you did tell anybody, he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until solemn silence was over.

The other monks are Brother Jerome, the senior novice after Brother Dunstan, a pious but rather dull young man with fair hair and a squashed face, and Brother Raymond, attractive and bird-like, and considered a great Romanizer by the others.  There is also Brother Walter, who is only a probationer and is not even allowed wide sleeves and a habit like Brother Lawrence, but has to wear a very moth-eaten cassock with a black band tied round it.  Brother Walter had been marketing in High Thorpe (I wonder what the Bishop of Silchester thought if he saw him in the neighbourhood of the episcopal castle!) and having lost himself on the way home he had arrived back late for Vespers and was tremendously teased by the others in consequence.  Brother Walter is a tall excitable awkward creature with black hair that sticks up on end and wide-open frightened eyes.  His cassock is much too short for him both in the arms and in the legs; and as he has very large hands and very large feet, his hands and