“You make me sick, Ted,” he used to declare.  “The sooner I get quit of Malta and quartered at Woolwich again, the better I shall be pleased.”

When at last the band-master was moved to Woolwich, he hoped that the effect of such prosaic surroundings would put an end to Ted’s mooning, and that he would settle down to a career more likely to reward him in this world rather than in that ambiguous world beyond to which his dreams aspired.  Edward, who was by this time seventeen and who had so far submitted to his father’s wishes as to be working in a solicitor’s office, found that the effect of being banished from Malta was to stimulate him into a practical attempt to express his dreams of religious devotion.  He hired a small room over a stable in a back street and started a club for the sons of soldiers.  The band-master would not have minded this so much, especially when he was congratulated on his son’s enterprise by the wife of the Colonel.  Unfortunately this was not enough for Edward, who having got the right side of an unscrupulously romantic curate persuaded him to receive his vows of a Benedictine oblate.  The band-master, proud and fond though he might be of his own uniform, objected to his son’s arriving home from business and walking about the house in a cassock.  He objected equally to finding that his own musical gifts had with his son degenerated into a passion for playing Gregorian chants on a vile harmonium.  It was only consideration for his delicate wife that kept the band-master from pitching both cassock and harmonium into the street.  The amateur oblate regretted his father’s hostility; but he persevered with the manner of life he had marked out for himself, finding much comfort and encouragement in reading the lives of the saintly founders of religious orders.

At last, after a long struggle against the difficulties that friends and father put in his way, Edward Burrowes managed at the age of twenty-seven to get ordained in Canada, whither, in despair of escaping otherwise from the solicitor’s office, he had gone to seek his own fortune.  He took with him the oblate’s cassock; but he left behind the harmonium, which his father kicked to pieces in rage at not being able to kick his son.  Burrowes worked as a curate in a dismal lakeside town in Ontario, consoling himself with dreams of monasticism and chivalry, and gaining a reputation as a preacher.  His chief friend was a young farmer, called George Harvey, whom he succeeded in firing with his own enthusiasm and whom he managed to persuade—­which shows that Burrowes must have had great powers of persuasion—­to wear the habit of a Benedictine novice, when he came to spend Saturday night to Monday morning with his friend.  By this time Burrowes had passed beyond the oblate stage, for having found a Canadian bishop willing to dispense him from that portion of the Benedictine rule which was incompatible with his work as a curate in Jonesville, Ontario, he got himself clothed as a