and the corn-flowers were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn
with a steady light, as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of
the wheat. Through the corn sea ran a blue river, and always green
meadows and lines of tall poplars followed its windings. The old Church
had been burned, and that was the reason why the monks caused me to build
the new one; the buildings of the Abbey were built at the same time as
the burned-down Church, more than a hundred years before I was born, and
they were on the north side of the Church, and joined to it by a cloister
of round arches, and in the midst of the cloister was a lawn, and in the
midst of that lawn, a fountain of marble, carved round about with flowers
and strange beasts, and at the edge of the lawn, near the round arches,
were a great many sun-flowers that were all in blossom on that autumn
day, and up many of the pillars of the cloister crept passion-flowers and
roses. Then farther from the Church, and past the cloister and its
buildings, were many detached buildings, and a great garden round them,
all within the circle of the poplar trees; in the garden were trellises
covered over with roses, and convolvolus, and the great-leaved fiery
nasturium; and specially all along by the poplar trees were there
trellises, but on these grew nothing but deep crimson roses; the
hollyhocks too were all out in blossom at that time, great spires of
pink, and orange, and red, and white, with their soft, downy leaves. I
said that nothing grew on the trellises by the poplars but crimson roses,
but I was not quite right, for in many places the wild flowers had crept
into the garden from without; lush green briony, with green-white
blossoms, that grows so fast, one could almost think that we see it grow,
and deadly nightshade, La bella donna, O! so beautiful; red berry, and
purple, yellow-spiked flower, and deadly, cruel-looking, dark green leaf,
all growing together in the glorious days of early autumn. And in the
midst of the great garden was a conduit, with its sides carved with
histories from the Bible, and there was on it too, as on the fountain in