A Childs Book of Saints | Page 3

all sculptured over with tracery of
flowers and foliage.
"True, father?"
"True as true, dear. Some day I shall take you to see for yourself."
We know a dip in a dingle where the woodcutters have left a log among
the hazels, and here, having wheeled Guy into a dappling of sunny
discs and leaf-shadows in a grassy bay, we sat down on the log, and
talked in an undertone. Our failure to find the Oak-men's church
reminded me of the old legends of lost and invisible churches, the bells
of which are heard ringing under the snow, or in the depths of the
woods, or far away in burning deserts, or fathom-deep beneath the blue
sea; but the pilgrim or the chance wayfarer who has heard the music of
the bells has never succeeded in discovering the way that leads to the
lost church. It is on the clear night of St. John's Day, the longest day of
the year, or on the last hour of Christmas Eve, that these bells are heard
pealing most sweet and clear.
It was in this way that we came to tell Christian legends and to talk of
saints and hermits, of old abbeys and minsters, of visions and miracles
and the ministry of Angels. Guy, W. V. thought, might be able, if only
he could speak, to tell us much about heaven and the Angels; it was so
short a time since he left them. She herself had quite forgotten, but,

then--deprecatingly--it was so long and long and long ago; "eight years,
a long time for me."
The faith and the strange vivid daydreams of the Middle Ages were a
new world into which she was being led along enchanted footpaths;
quite different from the worldly world of the "Old Romans," and of
English history; more real it seemed and more credible, for all its
wonders, than the world of elves and water-maidens. Delightful as it
was, it was scarce believable that fairies ever carried a little girl up
above the tree-tops and swung her in the air from one to another; but
when St. Catherine of Siena was a little child, and went to be a hermit
in the woods, and got terribly frightened, and lost her way, and sat
down to cry, the Angels, you know, did really and truly waft her up on
their wings and carried her to the valley of Fontebranda, which was
very near home. And when she was quite a little thing and used to say
her prayers going up to bed, the Angels would come to her and just
"whip" her right up the stairs in an instant!
Occasionally these legends brought us to the awful brink of religious
controversies and insoluble mysteries, but, like those gentle savages
who honour the water-spirits by hanging garlands from tree to tree
across the river, W. V. could always fling a bridge of flowers over our
abysses. "Our sense," she would declare, "is nothing to God's; and
though big people have more sense than children, the sense of all the
big people in the world put together would be no sense to His." "We are
only little babies to Him; we do not understand Him at all." Nothing
seemed clearer to her than the reasonableness of one legend which
taught that though God always answers our prayers, He does not
always answer in the way we would like, but in some better way than
we know. "Yes," she observed, "He is just a dear old Father." Anything
about our Lord engrossed her imagination; and it was a frequent wish
of hers that He would come again. "Then,"--poor perplexed little mortal!
whose difficulties one could not even guess at--"we should be quite
sure of things. Miss Catherine tells us from books: He would tell us
from His memory. People would not be so cruel to Him now. Queen
Victoria would not allow any one to crucify Him."

I don't think that W. V., in spite of her confidence in my good faith,
was quite convinced of the existence of those old forests of which I had
told her, until I explained that they were forests of stone, which, if men
did not mar them, would blossom for centuries unchanged, though the
hands that planted them had long been blown in dust about the world.
She understood all that I meant when we visited York and Westminster,
and walked through the long avenues of stone palms and pines, with
their overarching boughs, and gazed at the marvellous rose-windows in
which all the jewels of the world seemed to have been set, and saw the
colours streaming through the gorgeous lancets and high many-lighted
casements. After that it was delightful to turn over engravings and
photographs of ruined abbeys and famous old