The Seven Years of Seeking 129
“Who told thee these things?’ asked

Serapion.

“No one has told me,” replied the lad,
“but seeing the little children thus gazing
out, and knowing that all who would enter
into, heaven must become as they are, I
thought it must needs be in this manner that
people change and pass away to God when
the ending of life is come.”

On this isle the Sea-farers kept a Christ-
mas, and they made such cheer as they might
at that blessed time, speaking of the stony
fields wherein the Shepherds lay about their
flocks, but no fields were ever so stony as
these which were littered with stones fathom-
deep, with never a grain of earth or blade of
grass between. And in this isle it was that
Brother Benedict died, very peaceful, and
without pain at the close. On the feast
of the Three Kings that poor monk was
privileged even more than those Kings
had been, for not only was the Babe
of Heaven made manifest to him, but his
soul, a little child, went forth from him
to be with that benign Babe for evermore.
Under the dead tree the Sea-farers buried
him, and on the trunk of the tree they

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