第58章 Chapter 22(4)

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl;nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers,it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language.I was so impressed with this,that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence,and stood uncovered;and if words had been water,I had been drowned,sure.She had exactly the German way;whatever was in her mind to be delivered,whether a mere remark,or a sermon,or a cyclopedia,or the history of a war,she would get it into a single sentence or die.Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence,that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon.It was a most strange menagerie.The chief emulation among them seemed to be,to see which could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperous with vermin.Their manner and attitudes were the last expression of complacent self-righteousness.

It was one anchorite's pride to lie naked in the mud and let the insects bite him and blister him unmolested;it was another's to lean against a rock,all day long,conspicuous to the admiration of the throng of pilgrims and pray;it was another's to go naked and crawl around on all fours;it was another's to drag about with him,year in and year out,eighty pounds of iron;it was another's to never lie down when he slept,but to stand among the thorn-bushes and snore when there were pilgrims around to look;a woman,who had the white hair of age,and no other apparel,was black from crown to heel with forty-seven years of holy abstinence from water.

Groups of gazing pilgrims stood around all and every of these strange objects,lost in reverent wonder,and envious of the fleckless sanctity which these pious austerities had won for them from an exacting heaven.

By and by we went to see one of the supremely great ones.He was a mighty celebrity;his fame had penetrated all Christendom;the noble and the renowned journeyed from the remotest lands on the globe to pay him reverence.His stand was in the center of the widest part of the valley;and it took all that space to hold his crowds.

His stand was a pillar sixty feet high,with a broad platform on the top of it.He was now doing what he had been doing every day for twenty years up there --bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly almost to his feet.It was his way of praying.I timed him with a stop watch,and he made 1,244revolutions in 24minutes and 46seconds.It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste.It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics,the pedal movement;so I made a note in my memorandum book,purposing some day to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it.I afterward carried out that scheme,and got five years'good service out of him;in which time he turned out upward of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts,which was ten a day.I worked him Sundays and all;he was going,Sundays,the same as week days,and it was no use to waste the power.These shirts cost me nothing but just the mere trifle for the materials --I furnished those myself,it would not have been right to make him do that --and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a dollar and a half apiece,which was the price of fifty cows or a blooded race horse in Arthurdom.They were regarded as a perfect protection against sin,and advertised as such by my knights everywhere,with the paint-pot and stencil-plate;insomuch that there was not a cliff or a bowlder or a dead wall in England but you could read on it at a mile distance:

"Buy the only genuine St.Stylite;patronized by the Nobility.Patent applied for."There was more money in the business than one knew what to do with.

As it extended,I brought out a line of goods suitable for kings,and a nobby thing for duchesses and that sort,with ruffles down the forehatch and the running-gear clewed up with a featherstitch to leeward and then hauled aft with a back-stay and triced up with a half-turn in the standing rigging forward of the weather-gaskets.Yes,it was a daisy.

But about that time I noticed that the motive power had taken to standing on one leg,and I found that there was something the matter with the other one;so I stocked the business and unloaded,taking Sir Bors de Ganis into camp financially along with certain of his friends;for the works stopped within a year,and the good saint got him to his rest.But he had earned it.I can say that for him.

When I saw him that first time --however,his personal condition will not quite bear deion here.You can read it in the Lives of the Saints.

[All the details concerning the hermits,in this chapter,are from Lecky --but greatly modified.This book not being a history but only a tale,the majority of the historian's frank details were too strong for reproduction in it.-EDITOR]