Finally the librarian would show them his treasures — a Psalms of the fourth century, its binding thickly incrusted with jewels and kept in a jeweled box; a Gospels written in silver letters on purple vellum, and a great folio missal with wonderful full-paged miniatures in blue and gold and every capital throughout of burnished gold.

Discussing these matters and other such things for some little time, they would find on descending again to the courtyard that the monks had finished their meal and scattered to various employments. On the way to the school library, at the diagonally opposite corner of this quadrangle, they would pass the open doors of the writing rooms, and perhaps see copyists and authors bending over their desks, and in the one larger writing-room, eight or ten writing simultaneously copies of a work which is being dictated to them by a reader. The presses for the school-books prove not unlike the other presses, but their contents differ in having many copies each of the text-books prescribed for the university degree — for the school is a true university, with its studies modeled on Paris or Bologna. This collection is near the door of the lecture-room, and looking in, they would see the students sitting cross-legged on the straw-strewn stone floor, some with vellum on knee writing, and others studying their text-books.

Returning to the north cloister, the visitor would be shown, opposite the treasury, a chest full of books for the novices, and, inside, the archive, where documents, charters, and the like are kept in chests such as have been in use for these purposes, already at this time, for three thousand years or more.

It being now time for their own din-