more, sipping their wine, talking, chaffing, quarrelling, long after the dinner had disappeared. Extraordinary feasts would be celebrated with the enthusiasm of school-boys: there would be banquets of a most sumptuous character with linen tablecloths, flowers, and myriads of glasses; wine in abundance and of excellent quality; music, instrumental and vocal; dramatic, humorous, and character sketches. In the larger convents, where there are about thirty priests and forty or fifty students, there was plenty of musical talent, and concerts would sometimes be prepared for weeks in advance in honour of a jubilee or similar festival; and every priest had his circle of ‘quasels’ — pious admirers and penitents of the gentler sex — who undertook the culinary honours of his festival.
The quantity of beer and of Bordeaux which they consume is enormous, yet I saw no excesses in that direction: their capacity, however, is astonishing, and there are few of them who do not kindle at the prospect of an extra pint of beer or of a bottle of red wine. The youngest novices take three pints of beer per day, for they take no tea in the afternoon, and soon learn to look out for every opportunity of an extra pint. Spirits are forbidden, though a few of the elders who have been on the English mission have developed a taste for whisky. They tell a curious story in connection with it in one of their monasteries. An English visitor had smuggled over a bottle for a lay-brother whom he had known in former years
