A Childs Book of Saints | Page 4

churches at home and
abroad, and to anticipate the good time when we should visit them
together, and perhaps not only descend into the crypts but go through
the curious galleries which extend over the pillars of the nave, and even
climb up to the leaded roof of the tower, or dare the long windy
staircases and ladders which mount into the spire, and so look down on
the quaint map of streets, and houses, and gardens, and squares,
hundreds of feet below.
She liked to hear how some of those miracles of stone had been
fashioned and completed--how monks in the days of old had travelled
over the land with the relics of saints, collecting treasure of all sorts for
the expense of the work; how sometimes the people came in hundreds
dragging great oaks and loads of quarried stone, and bringing fat hogs,
beans, corn, and beer for the builders and their workmen; how even
queens carried block or beam to the masons, so that with their own
hands they might help in the glorious labour; and poor old women gave
assistance by cooking food and washing and spinning and weaving and
making and mending; how when the foundations were blessed kings
and princes and powerful barons laid each a stone, and when the choir
sang the antiphon, "And the foundations of the wall were garnished
with all manner of precious stones," they threw costly rings and jewels
and chains of gold into the trench; and how years and generations
passed away, and abbots and bishops and architects and masons and
sculptors and labourers died, but new men took their places, and still
the vast work went on, and the beautiful pile rose higher and higher

into the everlasting heavens.
Then, too, we looked back at the vanished times when the world was
all so different from our world of to-day; and in green and fruitful spots
among the hills and on warm river-lawns and in olden cities of narrow
streets and overhanging roofs, there were countless abbeys and priories
and convents; and thousands of men and women lived the life of prayer
and praise and austerity and miracle and vision which is described in
the legends of the Saints. We lingered in the pillared cloisters where the
black-letter chronicles were written in Latin, and music was scored and
hymns were composed, and many a rare manuscript was illuminated in
crimson and blue and emerald and gold; and we looked through the fair
arches into the cloister-garth where in the green sward a grave lay ever
ready to receive the remains of the next brother who should pass away
from this little earth to the glory of Paradise. What struck W. V.
perhaps most of all was, that in some leafy places these holy houses
were so ancient that even the blackbirds and throstles had learned to
repeat some of the cadences of the church music, and in those places
the birds still continue to pipe them, though nothing now remains of
church or monastery except the name of some field or street or well,
which people continue to use out of old habit and custom.
[Illustration: Women lived the life of prayer and praise]
It was with the thought of helping the busy little brain to realise
something of that bygone existence, with its strange modes of thought,
its unquestioning faith in the unseen and eternal, its vivid
consciousness of the veiled but constant presence of the holy and
omnipotent God, its stern self-repression and its tender charity, its
lovely ideals and haunting legends, that I told W. V. the stories in this
little book. It mattered little to her or to me that that existence had its
dark shadows contrasting with its celestial light: it was the light that
concerned us, not the shadows.
Some of the stories were told on the log, while Guy slept in his
mail-cart in the dappled shelter of the dingle; others by a winter fire
when the days were short, and the cry of the wind in the dark made it
easy for one to believe in wolves; others in the Surrey hills, a year ago,

in a sandy hollow crowned with bloom of the ling, and famous for a
little pool where the martins alight to drink and star the mud with a
maze of claw-tracks; and yet again, others, this year,[1] under the dry
roof of the pines of Anstiebury, when the fosse of the old Briton
settlement was dripping with wet, and the woods were dim with the
smoke of rain, and the paths were red with the fallen bloom of the red
chestnuts and white with the flourish of May and brown with the
catkins of the oak, and the cuckoo, calling in Mosses Wood, was
answered from