and led him back to the stairs, and carried him up to his room. But,
when he was gone, the Abbot of Sheering walked thoughtfully up and down
the cloister for a long time, even until the refectory bell began to
ring for dinner, and he could hear the shuffling steps of the two
hundred hungry monks hurrying to their food, through the distant
staircases and corridors.




CHAPTER V


An autumn morning at dawn, the beach at Dover, the tide at flood, and a
hundred half naked sailors launching a long, black Norman sea-boat bows
on, over chocks through the low surf to the grey swell beyond. The
little vessel had been beached by the stern, with a slack chain hooked
to her sides at the water-line, and a long hawser rove through a rough
fiddle-block of enormous size, and leading to a capstan set far above
high-water mark and made fast by the bight of a chain to an anchor
buried in the sand up to the heavy wooden stock. And now a big old man
with streaming grey beard, and a skin like a salted ox-hide, was
slacking the turns of the hawser from the capstan-drum as the boat
moved slowly down over the well-greased chocks, stopping short now and
then of her own accord, and refusing to move on till twenty stout
sailors on each side, their legs half buried in the sand, their broad
shoulders flattened under the planking, their thick brown hands planted
upon their thighs, like so many Atlases, each bearing a world, had
succeeded, by alternately straining and yielding, in making the little
vessel rock on her keel, and start again toward the water's edge. On