You must not go away with the idea, however, that Darlugdacha’s “Instruction” was all gained by learning to re-tell the old tales. She had her reading and writing lessons, too. I like to think that the same method was adopted with her to make her learn her letters, as was found efficacious with Saint Columbkille. Perhaps Blathnata made a cake for her—a nice cake with plenty of honey in it—and traced the alphabet on the top of it. As Darlugdacha learned to know the letters, she could make her very own of them, you see, by eating them. It may have required more than one cake to make the process of instruction complete. No matter how many were needed, I am sure Blathnata did not spare them. At last, Darlugdacha had got beyond her alphabet cakes, and was all afire to get helping the sisters to copy the psalter. Cilldara was a small place in those days, and had no “Teach Screptra.”[5] But the books hung in their leathern satchels from hooks along the walls of the Erdam (or Sacristy) that opened off the little Church. Hither came the nuns in turn to help to make the new copies, of which the Abbess had constant need to bestow in alms on poor churches. Two or three other virgins had joined the community since Darlugdacha’s coming; and one of them, the daughter of a scribe, was particularly skilful at the work. Darlugdacha was fascinated by it. She would stand for hours at a time watching the clever pen go delicately over the vellum—and longing for the day when she, too, would sit at a desk with a quill in her right hand, and a knife in her left to keep it pointed, with her conical ink-cup fastened to her chair-arm—a fully-equipped scribe. In the meantime, she was forced to content herself with her fan-shaped, waxed tablets, on which she practised copying with a metal “style.” When the wax surface was used up, she rubbed it smooth, and began over again. Thus the little hands grew sure and steady—and, at last, one day, on an old piece of vellum, they tried their skill with the pen.