Just as this worship of woman was the great social note of the Middle Ages, so the devotion to the Blessed Virgin was the distinguishing religious feature of those times. In honour of Our Lady were erected the magnificent Gothic cathedrals--those masterpieces of moral elevation--which stud the fair land of France like painted capitals upon a written page. In these buildings the genius of the Middle Ages found its supreme expression. Above the crowded market-place and narrow mediæval street rose those incomparable churches, "like Gothic queens at prayer, alone, silent and adorned." In her honour, too, they were made beautiful with glass and statuary, so that never before nor since were churches filled with such an entrancing congregation, never had buildings such wonderful eyes. And at a time when masons built to her honour and theologians defined her position, the story-tellers were not slack in her praise. The three legends relating to the Virgin, which I have included in this book of translations, are but specimens of an immense literature devoted to her service. "Our Lady's Tumbler" is, to the modern taste, one of the most appealing of all these legends, but there are others nearly, if not quite, so beautiful. Once upon a time there was a monk who was so ignorant that he was exposed to the rebuke of his brethren. But in his devotion to Our Lady he took for his meditation five psalms, each commencing with a letter of her name. And when it pleased God that his end should come, there happened a very beauteous miracle, for from his mouth came forth five fresh roses, sweet, crimson and leafy, in honour of the five letters of the name of Maria. Again, how exquisite is the story of the nun who by frailty of heart fled from her cloister to give herself over to sin. After many long years she returned to the nunnery, having lost her innocence, but not her faith, for during all her wanderings she had never omitted her habit of prayer to Our Lady. But, to her surprise, always she was addressed by her sisters as if she had never gone from amongst them. For the Blessed Virgin, having clothed herself with the vesture and seeming of the truant who loved her, even in sin, took also upon her the duties of a sacristan from which she had fled, so that no single person had noticed the absence from her cloister of the faithless nun.