The Curse Upon Mitre Square — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE NEOPHYTE. 9 no easy matter, and the conduct of the forty being, as a rule, so exemplary, the Prior—easy-going, weak-minded man that he was—soon abandoned his search, and dismissed the rumour as unfounded. Viewed from the events which afterwards oc- curred, it was a great misfortune to the monastery of Holy Trinity that Prior Handcock was at this juncture its chief. Not that the Prior was a bad ~ man; his faults were not those which would disgrace an ordinary individual, but they were eminently such as incapacitated him for rule. He was very unsuspicious, very frightened of an intellect superior to his own, and very liable to favouritism. The forty monks were, taking them as a body, a strong- minded, intellectual, and hard-headed set, and consequently he feared making his authority felt. It is, however, but fair to Handcock to mention that the men were apparently as good as they were clever, and performed cheerfully the by no means easy tasks allotted to them. The Prior’s favourite was generally the man who had last entered the monastery, and who came fresh from the pleasures, cares, and turmoils of life. There was much that was cheering in this habit of the Prior, and it often turned out well. The tran- quillity, the freedom from petty worries, the probabilities of future reward, the even tenor of the monkish life, were put before the young man with no little eloquence by the kind Prior, and the youth felt satisfied, and stifled any wish to return to the world and its wicked ways. But there was also a EONMIELOCO KS (E(@) mm