Page:A Dictionary of Saintly Women Volume 2.djvu/53

Rh beetle, always kill a beetle, it comes from hell." Peasants in our own country a generation ago would say to a beetle in the fields, with an accent of reproof or menace, "Yesterday, beetle, yesterday."

Once the holy family drew near to a great city where there were many images of false gods. They all fell down at the approach of the true God and His mother. Mary was afraid that as Herod had sought to kill the Saviour, much more would the Egyptians be jealous of Him when they heard that their great idol had fallen down at His coming. They went therefore to the wild places where rob- bers lived. The robbers at their approach heard a noise as of a king with a great army coming, they were terrified and fled in haste, leaving all their booty. Upon this, the prisoners whom they had taken, arose and loosened each other's bonds, and each taking his own property, went off. They met Joseph and Mary, and asked where the king and the soldiers were who had frightened away the robbers. Again they passed through a region infested with robbers, and saw a number of them lying asleep, two were lying on the road. Their names were Titus and Dumachus. (The Gospel of Nicodemus calls them Dimas and Gestas.) Titus said to Dumachus, "Let these persons go safely on their way and do not awake our companions." Dumachus refused, and Titus said, "I will give thee forty groats. Here, take my girdle as a pledge," and he gave it him at once that Dumachus might not speak or make any noise. When Mary saw the kindness of the good robber, she said, "The Lord God will receive thee at His right hand and grant thee pardon for thy sins." Then the Lord Jesus said to His mother, "When thirty years have passed, the Jews will crucify me at Jerusalem, and these two men will be crucified with me, Titus on my right hand and Dumachus on my left, and Titus shall go with me into Paradise that day." She said, "God forbid that this should be Thy lot." They next went to another city where there were many idols, and as soon as they came near it, the city was turned into heaps of sand. Thence they went to a sycamore tree, and there the Lord caused a well to spring forth in which Mary washed her Son's coat. A balsam grows in that country from the sweat which ran down from our Lord.

A great many miraculous cures, especially of leprosy and demoniacal possession, were performed by Mary, by means of the water in which she had washed her Son or His clothes. She defeated many cruel sorceries: one was in connection with a young man, the only protector of his sisters. A malignant sorcerer had changed him into a mule, but his sisters having hospitably received the holy travellers, revealed their grief to a young girl whom Mary had cured of leprosy and who had begged leave to remain with her and attend upon her. The Blessed Mary took her Son, set Him on the mule's back, and bade Him restore the animal to his true form; which he instantly did. The grateful sisters, with Mary's consent, married their brother to the girl who had had the honour of being her servant and had induced them to seek her aid.

After the return of the Holy Family to their own country, they lived at Nazareth, and many incidents are told of the next few years there and of the childhood of the Saviour. That of the Child Jesus tarrying behind in Jerusalem when Joseph and Mary had taken Him there on their yearly visit, at the feast of the passover, and His talking with the Rabbis there, and being missed and found again by His parents, is told both in the Gospel of St. Luke (ii. 41-50) and in the first Apocryphal Gospel of the In- fancy, with the addition (in the latter) that the doctors said, "Oh, happy Mary, who hast borne such a son!"

From this time until the beginning of our Lord's ministry, little is recorded of St. Mary. Smith's Dictionary says that she was probably—at all events from the time of Joseph's death-living with her sister Mary (5), who, contrary to the legendary account of St. Anne and her family, was older than the Blessed Virgin and whose children were much older than the Lord.

St. Mary was at the wedding-feast in Cana of Galilee, where our Lord's first