Gabriel and the Hour Book relates the story of the making of an "hour book" as a wedding gift from King Louis of France to Lady Anne of Brittany and the good fortune it brought to little Gabriel, Brother Stephen's color grinder.

As he and Gabriel laid all the pages together in the order in which they were to go, Brother Stephen's heart swelled with pride, and Gabriel thought he had never seen anything half so lovely!

The text was written in beautiful letters of the lustrous black ink which Gabriel had made; and at the beginnings of new chapters, wonderful initial letters glittered in gold and colours till they looked like little mosaics of precious stones.

Here and there through the text were scattered exquisite miniature pictures of saints and angels; while as for the borders that enclosed every page, they wreathed around the written words such lovely garlands of painted blossoms, that to Gabriel the whole book seemed a marvelous bouquet of all the sweet flowers he had daily gathered from the Norman fields, and that Brother Stephen, by the magic of his art, had made immortal. 

Taken from the Yesterday's Classics reprint description