He was a gaunt man with eyes as blue as Padraig’s own, black eyebrows and lashes, and a queer dreamy look except when he smiled.  His name was Brother Basil.  When he saw the bundle of especially fine sheepskins that Padraig had brought his face lit up so that it seemed as if the sun had come into the cloister.  “Good!” he said.  “I will give you a note to carry back.”

He took a bit of parchment which had once been written upon and had been scraped clean enough to use again, and made some queer marks upon it with his pen dipped in black fluid.  That was the first time Padraig had ever seen any one write.

It did not take long for Brother Basil to find out how fascinated the herd-boy was with the work of the scriptorium.  Before any one knew it Padraig was learning to read and write.  He learned so quickly that the Abbot and Brother Mark, the librarian, thought he might make a scribe.  But when he was asked if he would like to be a monk, he shook his head like a colt eager to be off.  Writing was great fun; he practiced with a stick in the sand or charcoal on a stone.  But it did not suit his idea of life to sit all day long filling books with page after page of writing.

He liked the making of colors even better than writing.  In the twelfth century painters could not buy paints wherever they might chance to be.  They had to make them.  Brother Basil had studied in Constantinople, or Byzantium as he called it, the treasure-house of books and of learning, with its great libraries and its marvelous old parchments illuminated in colors too precious to be used except for the Gospels or some rare volume of the Church.  As time went on Padraig learned all that Brother Basil could teach him.

When a man is working on an important and difficult task, it means much to have a helper tending the fires or grinding the paints, who regards the work as the most important thing in the world and gives his whole mind to his occupation.  Such a helper may ask as many questions as he likes, and his master will be glad to give him all the instruction he can possibly want.

Most of the people of the Abbey, in fact, liked Padraig.  He knew so little that the monks and lay brothers and even the novices knew, and learned so quickly, and was so ready to put his own knowledge at their disposal, that it gave them the very comfortable feeling of being superior persons, whenever he was about.  But there was one person who did not like him.  This was Simon, a clerk attached to the house of the Irish prince who had given the land for the Abbey.  Simon was of the opinion that vagabond urchins from no one knew where were not proper pupils for monastic schools even in Ireland, which was on the extreme western edge of Christendom.  But Brother Basil paid no attention to Simon’s opinion.  In fact, it is doubtful whether he ever knew that Simon had one.