Sentence The Threehundredandseventyfourth

If there was one thing he had learned in his life, it was how to be invisible; they wore dun cloaks which Brother Bede had given them from an inner sanctum where Tavish had noticed some manuscripts which might not have been to the Abbot's taste and with the old monk's wishes still in their ears, made their way as silently as ghosts along side walls and found the gate he had described – it let them out of the Abbey cloisters and into the open fields where lay Brothers could be seen at work, communing in their own way with the biota of this fertile valley, it's river teeming with fish 

and fruits ripening on hedgerows and canes, while vegetables grew in ordered rows, while the ordained Brethren were probably engaged in more noetic pursuits, and it was a rural scene which, to Bernie and Tammy could as easily have been from their own time, so it was difficult for them to admit that some 800, perhaps 850 years separated these two epochs; but when they reached the River, flowing just as sweetly between it's banks as on their last visit to Melrose, before, oh, long before this nightmare of assault and injury, of pain and fear, had been visited upon them – and then, suddenly, as they both glanced upstream, the came to a dead stop: the Bridge, the Bridge they had crossed and recrossed so many times in their lives – was gone! and Tavish paused, sensing their panic, and returned to lay a hand on each girl's shoulder: “no, girls,” he said softly, seeming to read their thoughts, “it's not 'gone' for it hasn't yet 'been'; the Swing Bridge was built in the early nineteenth century, I think it was completed in 1849, and before then, a boat ferried pedestrians across, and he pointed out a simple craft, pulled up on the further bank, with a young novice dozing beside it: “he is
the ferryman, Brother Bede keeps the accounts for the Abbey and has given me a few coins to tide us on our journey, shall we give the boy a penny to fetch us across on this frabjous day?”