at the White Cross on the hill, thriving and growing apace until
he had reached eleven or twelve years of age; a slender, fair-
haired little fellow, with a strange, quiet serious manner.

"Poor little child!" Old Brother Benedict would sometimes say to
the others, "poor little child! The troubles in which he was
born must have broken his wits like a glass cup. What think ye
he said to me to-day? 'Dear Brother Benedict,' said he, 'dost
thou shave the hair off of the top of thy head so that the dear
God may see thy thoughts the better?' Think of that now!" and
the good old man shook with silent laughter.

When such talk came to the good Father Abbot's ears, he smiled
quietly to himself. "It may be," said he, "that the wisdom of
little children flies higher than our heavy wits can follow."

At least Otto was not slow with his studies, and Brother
Emmanuel, who taught him his lessons, said more than once that,
if his wits were cracked in other ways, they were sound enough
in Latin.

Otto, in a quaint, simple way which belonged to him, was gentle
and obedient to all. But there was one among the Brethren of St.
Michaelsburg whom he loved far above all the rest - Brother John,
a poor half-witted fellow, of some twenty-five or thirty years
of age. When a very little child, he had fallen from his nurse's
arms and hurt his head, and as he grew up into boyhood, and
showed that his wits had been addled by his fall, his family
knew not what else to do with him, and so sent him off to the
Monastery of St. Michaelsburg, where he lived his simple,