bear repeating. Bede's account of Lady Hilda's death is perhaps less trite and not less marvellous. "When she had governed this monastery many years, it pleased Him who has made such merciful provision for our salvation, to give her holy soul the trial of a long sickness, to the end that, according to the Apostle's example, her virtue might be perfected in infirmity."

For six long years, we are told, this sickness lasted, and in the seventh, having received the viaticum, she called together the servants of God that were in the same monastery, and, while exhorting them to peace among themselves and universal goodwill, "passed from death to life.”.

"That same night it pleased Almighty God, by a manifest vision to make known her death in another monastery at a distance from hers, which she had built that same year, and is called Hakenes.1 There was in that monastery a certain nun called Begu, who had served God upwards of thirty years in monastic conversation. This nun, being then in the dormitory of the sisters, on a sudden heard the well-known sound of a bell in the air, which used to awake and call them to prayers when any one of them was taken out of this world, and opening her eyes, as she thought, she saw the top of the house open and a strong light pour in from above. Looking earnestly upon that light, she saw the soul of the aforesaid servant of God in that same light, attended and conducted to heaven by angels."

1 Beda, H. E., iv. 23.

Rising in a great fright, the nun ran to the. Virgin who then presided in the monastery instead of the Abbess, and whose name was Frigyth, and with many tears and sighs told her that the Abbess Hilda, mother of them all, had departed this life, and had in her sight ascended to eternal bliss." Then Frigyth awoke all the sisters, and called them to the church to pray for Abbess Hilda, "which they did during the remainder of the night." At daybreak came brothers from Streoneschalch, with news of Hilda's death, but the sisters told them they already knew it. "Thus it was by heaven happily ordained, that when some saw her departure out of this world, the others should be acquainted with her admittance into the spiritual life which is eternal." "These monasteries," adds the historian, "are about thirteen miles distant from each other."

For those who care rather for what they themselves are capable of believing than for the visions of that past which has "etched and moulded" in the mind and matter of to-day, there remain, at least, from the life of St. Hilda two accepted and accredited facts. To her, whether inspired by heavenly vision or prepared by unconscious cerebration, Cædmon, the silent and uncouth, poured forth his poems of the Old