Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/226

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220
TWELVE YEARS IN A MONASTERY

overcome. At my secession, a few months afterwards, the college prospered and its future was quite without anxiety.

I had one associate in teaching, a young and kindly but not very accomplished priest, so that a curious assortment of classes fell to my lot. I taught Latin Grammar, French, Euclid, Algebra, Physics, and a little Greek. And the difficulty of educating them was increased by my utter ignorance of the term they were to remain under me. I remonstrated with the authorities in vain: they were in utter discord themselves, and left everything to chance—some of them hoping the institution would fail. To enliven still further the monotony of our country life there was a revolt of the two servants or lay-brothers. They were both older than myself, selfish and unsympathetic, impatient of discipline: the authorities refused to remove them.

At the same time the bishop of the diocese was piteously calling my attention to the condition of the district, and putting a new charge on my shoulders. There was evidently more duplicity on this point. I was informed that there was no parish attached to the college; the bishop understood that there was, and had promised me a map of it. It mattered little, for the ‘parish’ would consist of an enormous extent of territory containing three Catholics known and three or four suspected. The town of Buckingham (containing 3,000 inhabitants) boasts of one Roman