of him. I wish, too, that every Monk of you have free access to
me, to speak of your needs or grievances when you will."'

The kinds of people Abbot Samson liked worst were these three:
_`Mendaces, ebriosi, verbosi,_ Liars, drunkards, and wordy or
windy persons;'--not good kinds, any of them! He also much
condemned 'persons given to murmur at their meat or drink,
especially Monks of that disposition. We remark, from the very
first, his strict anxious order to his servants to provide
handsomely for hospitality, to guard 'above all things that there
be no shabbiness in the matter of meat and drink; no look of
mean parsimony, in _novitate mea,_ at the beginning of my
Abbotship;' and to the last he maintains a due opulence of table
and equipment for others: but he is himself in the highest
degree indifferent to all such things.

'Sweet milk, honey, and other naturally sweet kinds of food, were
what he preferred to eat: but he had this virtue,' says Jocelin,
'he never changed the dish (_ferculum_) you set before him, be
what it might. Once when I, still a novice, happened to be
waiting table in the refectory, it came into my head' (rogue that
I was!) `to try if this were true; and I thought I would place
before him a _ferculum_ that would have displeased any other
person, the very platter being black and broken. But he, seeing
it, was as one that saw it not: and now some little delay taking
place, my heart smote me that I had done this; and so, snatching
up the platter (_discus_), I changed both it and its contents for
a better, and put down that instead; which emendation he was
angry at, and rebuked me for,'--the stoical monastic man! 'For
the first seven years he had commonly four sorts of dishes on his