For the rest of the day my father shut himself in his room, while my
uncle spent the most of it seated on the brewhouse steps in a shaded
corner of the back court, through which the monks brought in their
furniture and returned to the ship for more. The bundles they
carried were prodigious, and all the morning they worked without halt
or rest, ascending and descending the hill in single file and always
at equal distances one behind another. Watching from the terrace
down the slope of the park as they came and went, you might have
taken them for a company of ants moving camp. But my uncle never
wholly recovered from the shock of their first freight, to see man by
man cross the court with a stout coffin on his back and above each
coffin a pack of straw: nor was he content with Fra Basilio's
explanation that the brethren slept in these coffins by rule and
saved the expense of beds.

"For my part," said my uncle, "considering the numbers that manage
it, I should have thought death no such dexterity as to need
practice."

"Yet bethink you, sir, of St. Paul's words. 'I protest,' said he,
'I die daily.'"

"Why, yes, sir, and so do we all," agreed my uncle, and fell silent,
though on the very point, as it seemed, of continuing the argument.
"I did not choose to be discourteous, lad," he explained to me later:
"but I had a mind to tell him that we do daily a score of things we
don't brag about--of which I might have added that washing is one:
and I believe 'twould have been news to him."

I had never known my uncle in so rough a temper. Poor man!