The StoneHe put on beggar’s garb, a hair shirt with a rope girdle, and took nothing with him but a gnarled stick, no bag for bread, not even a begging-bowl. The tablet, however, written by his and his children’s mother, that he took, and wore it next his bare body. So he went down in the twilight from the citadel of his unhappy joy, down and away, resolved to grant himself no grace but this, of bearing his distresses with willing heart. What he wished was that God would send him into a desert, where he might do penance unto death.
That night he slept under a tree, which let the first leaves fall upon the pilgrim, slept there as once on the island when he had learned of his birth, so that neither hut nor cloister could longer shelter him and only heaven be his roof-tree. Men and the highwa
