it struck me as being a little presumptuous.  Of course, I have no doubt whatever that St. Peter would take me under his protection, for if you remember he was a modest saint, a very modest saint indeed who asked to be crucified upside down, not liking to show the least sign of competition with our dear Lord.  I should very much like to call myself Brother Paul, because at the school I was at we were taken twice a year to see St. Paul’s Cathedral and had toffee when we came home.  I look back to those days as some of the happiest of my life.  There again it does seem to be putting yourself up rather to take the name of a great saint like St. Paul.  Then I thought of taking William after the little St. William of Norwich who was murdered by the Jews.  That seems going to the other extreme, doesn’t it, for though I know that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings shall come forth praise, one would like to feel one had for a patron saint somebody a little more conspicuous than a baby.  I wish you’d give me a word of advice.  I think about this problem until sometimes my head’s in a regular whirl, and I lose my place in the Office.  Only yesterday at Sext, I found myself saying the antiphon proper to St. Peter a fortnight after St. Peter’s day had passed and gone, which seems to show that my mind is really set upon being Brother Peter, doesn’t it?  And yet I don’t know.  He is so very conspicuous all through the Gospels, isn’t he?”

“Then why don’t you compromise,” suggested Mark, “and call yourself Brother Simon?”

“Oh, what a splendid idea!” Brother Walter exclaimed, clapping his hands.  “Oh, thank you, Brother Mark.  That has solved all my difficulties.  Oh, do let me pull up that thistle for you.”

Brother Walter the probationer resumed his weeding with joyful ferocity of purpose, his mind at peace in the expectation of shortly becoming Brother Simon the postulant.

What Mark enjoyed most in his personal relations with the community were the walks on Sunday afternoons.  Sir Charles Horner made a habit of joining these to obtain the Abbey gossip and also because he took pleasure in hearing himself hold forth on the management of his estate.  Most of his property was woodland, and the walks round Malford possessed that rich intimacy of the English countryside at its best.  Mark was not much interested in what Sir Charles had to ask or in what Sir Charles had to tell or in what Sir Charles had to show, but to find himself walking with his monastic brethren in their habits down glades of mighty oaks, or through sparse plantations of birches, beneath which grew brakes of wild raspberries that would redden with the yellowing corn, gave him as assurance of that old England before the Reformation to which he looked back as to a Golden Age.  Years after, when much that was good and much that was bad in his monastic experience had been forgotten, he held in his memory one of these walks on a fine afternoon at July’s end within the octave of St. Mary Magdalene.