bound with a leathern girdle. His long black locks, unshorn from
childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek
and chin showed the spring of healthful manhood; his hard hands and
sinewy sunburnt limbs told of labour and endurance; his flashing
eyes and beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which
had no sphere of action in such a place. What did his glorious
young humanity alone among the tombs?

So perhaps he, too, thought, as he passed his hand across his brow,
as if to sweep away some gathering dream, and sighing, rose and
wandered along the cliffs, peering downward at every point and
cranny, in search of fuel for the monastery from whence he came.

Simple as was the material which he sought, consisting chiefly of
the low arid desert shrubs, with now and then a fragment of wood
from some deserted quarry or ruin, it was becoming scarcer and
scarcer round Abbot Pambo's Laura at Scetis; and long before
Philammon had collected his daily quantity, he had strayed farther
from his home than he had ever been before.

Suddenly, at a turn of the glen, he came upon a sight new to
him....a temple carved in the sandstone cliff; and in front a smooth
platform, strewn with beams and mouldering tools, and here and there
a skull bleaching among the sand, perhaps of some workman
slaughtered at his labour in one of the thousand wars of old. The
abbot, his spiritual father--indeed, the only father whom he knew,
for his earliest recollections were of the Laura and the old man's
cell-had strictly forbidden him to enter, even to approach any of
those relics of ancient idolatry: but a broad terrace-road led down
to the platform from the table-land above; the plentiful supply of