BOOK IV.
Meanwhile John Gale, or Brother Boreas, as he was known in the monastery, was submitting--among other rigors--to an exceptionally severe winter in Bishopsgate Street, which seemed to have an Arctic climate of its own,--possibly induced by the "freezing-out" process of certain stock companies in its vicinity.
"You are miserable, and eager to get out in the wicked world again, my son," said the delightful old Superior, as he sat by the only fire, sipping a glass of mulled port, when John came in from shoveling snow outside.

"I, therefore, merely to try you, shall make you gatekeeper.
The keys of the monastery front door are under the door-mat in my cell, but I am a sound sleeper." He smiled seraphically, and winked casually as he sipped his port.

"We will call it, if you please--a penance." John threw himself in an agony of remorse and shame at the feet of the Superior.

"It isn't of myself I'm thinking," he confessed wildly, "but of that poor young man, Brother Bones, in the next cell to mine.

He is a living skeleton, has got only one lung and an atrophied brain.