He was a gaunt man with eyes as blue as Padraig's own, black eyebrows and
lashes, and a queer dreamy look except when he smiled. His name was
Brother Basil. When he saw the bundle of especially fine sheepskins that
Padraig had brought his face lit up so that it seemed as if the sun had
come into the cloister. "Good!" he said. "I will give you a note to carry
back."

He took a bit of parchment which had once been written upon and had been
scraped clean enough to use again, and made some queer marks upon it with
his pen dipped in black fluid. That was the first time Padraig had ever
seen any one write.

It did not take long for Brother Basil to find out how fascinated the
herd-boy was with the work of the scriptorium. Before any one knew it
Padraig was learning to read and write. He learned so quickly that the
Abbot and Brother Mark, the librarian, thought he might make a scribe. But
when he was asked if he would like to be a monk, he shook his head like a
colt eager to be off. Writing was great fun; he practiced with a stick in
the sand or charcoal on a stone. But it did not suit his idea of life to
sit all day long filling books with page after page of writing.

He liked the making of colors even better than writing. In the twelfth
century painters could not buy paints wherever they might chance to be.
They had to make them. Brother Basil had studied in Constantinople, or
Byzantium as he called it, the treasure-house of books and of learning,
with its great libraries and its marvelous old parchments illuminated in
colors too precious to be used except for the Gospels or some rare volume
of the Church. As time went on Padraig learned all that Brother Basil
could teach him.