Page:History of the Franks.djvu/282

 250 SELECTIONS FROM EIGHT BOOKS OF MIRACLES bake. When she did this her right hand was miraculously set on fire and began to burn. She screamed and wept and hastened to the village church in which relics of the blessed John are kept. And she prayed and made a vow that on this day sacred to the divine name she would do no work, but only pray. The next night she made a candle as tall as herself. Then she spent the whole night in prayer, holding the candle in her hand all the time, and the flame went out and she returned home safe and sound. Relics Handed Down in Gregory's Family {Ibid., ch. 83) 1 shall now describe what was brought to pass through the relics which my father carried with him in former times. When Theodobert ^ gave orders that sons of men in Auvergne should be taken as hostages, my father, at that time lately married, wished to be protected by relics of the saints, and he asked a certain bishop kindly to give him some, thinking he would be kept safe by such protection when absent on his distant journey. Then he enclosed the holy ashes in a gold case the shape of a pea-pod and placed them around his neck; but the man did not know the blessed names. He was accustomed to relate that he was saved by them from many dangers ; for he bore witness that by their miraculous power he had often escaped attacks of highwaymen and dangers on rivers and the furies of civil war and thrusts of the sword. And I shall not fail to tell what I saw of these with my own eyes. After my father's death my mother always wore these precious things on her person. Now the grain harvest had come and great grain stacks were gathered at the threshing places. And in those days when the threshing was going on, a cold spell came on, and seeing that Limagne ^ has no forests, being all covered with crops, the threshers made themselves fires of straw, since there was nothing else to make a fire of. Meantime all went away to eat. And behold, the fire gradually increased and began to spread slowly straw by straw. Then the piles suddenly caught, with the south ^ Theodobert I, 534-548. 2 One of the most fertile spots in France. Cf. Lavisse, Histoire de France^ I, pp. 296-301.