“Aha! our friend is not so ignorant of country lore as I had fancied,” exclaimed Madame Bavoil.

“Oh, I wandered in the woods a little, as a child.”

“For the choir no discussion is possible, I believe,” said the Abbe Gevresin.  “The eucharistic plants, the vine and corn are self-evidently appropriate.

“The vine, of which the Lord said ‘Ego vitis sum,’ is also the emblem of communion and the image of the eighth beatitude; corn, which, as the Sacramental element, was the object of peculiar care and respect in the Middle Ages.

“You have only to recall the solemn ceremonial observed in certain convents when the wafer was to be prepared.

“At Saint Etienne, Caen, the monks washed their face and hands, and kneeling before the altar of Saint Benedict, said Lauds, the seven penitential Psalms, and the Litanies of the Saints.  Then a lay brother presented the mould in which the wafers were to be baked, two at a time; and on the day when this unleavened bread was prepared those who had taken part in the ceremony dined together, and their table was served exactly like the Abbot’s.

“At Cluny, again, three priests or three deacons, fasting after the above-mentioned services of prayer, put on albs and invited the aid of certain lay brethren.  They mixed the flour of wheat that had been sifted by the novices, grain by grain, with a due quantity of water; and a monk wearing gloves baked the wafers one by one over a large fire of brushwood, in an iron mould stamped with the proper symbols.”

“That reminds me,” said Durtal, as he lighted a cigarette, “of the mill for grinding the wheat for the offering.”

“I am familiar with the mystical wine-press which was often represented by the glass-workers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,” said the Abbe Gevresin.  “That was practically a paraphrase of Isaiah’s prophetic verse:  ’I have trodden the wine-press alone, and there was no man with me’; but the mystic mill is, I own, unknown to me.”

“I have seen it once at Berne, in a window of the fifteenth century,” said the Abbe Plomb.

“I also saw it in the cathedral at Erfurt, painted, not on glass, but on a panel.  The picture is by no known painter, and dated 1534.  I can see it now:  Above, God the Father, a good old man with a snowy beard, solemn and thoughtful; and the mill, like a coffee mill, fixed on the edge of a table, with the drawer open below.  The evangelical beasts are emptying into the hopper, skins full of scrolls on which are written the effective Sacramental words.  These scrolls are swallowed in the body of the machine, and come out into the drawer, thence falling into a chalice held by a Cardinal and Bishop kneeling at the table.

“And the texts are changed into a little Child in the act of blessing while the four Evangelists turn a long silver crank in the right-hand corner of the panel.”

“What seems strange,” remarked the Abbe Gevresin, “is that it should be the formula of Transubstantiation and not the substance that is changed, and that the Evangelists, twice represented—­under their animal and their human aspect—­pour into the mill and grind.  And also that the sacred oblation should be represented by the living flesh.