Chapter XVII.--"And St. Patrick, guided by his angelic guide, came to the sea, and he there found a ship that was to carry him to Britain, and a crew of heathens, who were in the ship, freely received him, and hoisting their sails with a favourable wind, after three days they made land. And, being come out of the ship, they found a region deserted and inhabited by none, and they began to travel over the whole country for the space of twenty-eight days; and for want of food in that fearful and wild solitude were they perishing of hunger" (Jocelin's "Life of St. Patrick," translated by E. L. Swift). Jocelin's "Life of St. Patrick" deserves the harsh sentence pronounced upon it by Canon O'Hanlon: "It is incomparably the worst" of all the Latin "Lives" of the Saint. Jocelin represents Conchessa, St. Patrick's saintly mother, as a niece of St. Martin of Tours, and, almost in the same breath, suggests that either St. Martin's brother, or his brother- in-law, sold Conchessa and her elder sister to Calphurnius, a Briton of Clydesdale, as slaves. Although Conchessa was sold as a slave "at the command of her father," she is said to have succeeded in captivating and marrying her master Calphurnius. Whilst Ware and Usher sneer at Jocelin's statement that Calphurnius and Conchessa took the vow of celibacy and devoted themselves to a religious life immediately after St. Patrick's birth, they eagerly adopt Jocelin's statement that the Apostle of Ireland was born at "Empthor," and that the home of The Sixth "Life," Calphurnius was "not far from the Irish Sea," although this untrustworthy author stands alone among the ancient writers in making this assertion. Although Jocelin is responsible for the statement that St. Patrick fled to the island of Britain after his escape from captivity in Ireland, the subsequent three days' voyage by sea and twenty-eight days' journey by land before reaching his home are fatal to Jocelin's contention, as Professor Bury clearly demonstrates. Ware's Empthor was near Dumbarton; Colgan's, Dumbarton itself; Usher and the "Aberdeen Breviary" identify it as Kilpatrick; Cardinal Moran rests sure that it is Hamilton, at the mouth of the Avon in Scotland; but St. Patrick's ship, chartered by Heaven to carry him to his "own native land," could, if any of the places named were St. Patrick's native town, have borne him directly almost to his destination, and saved part at least of the three days' journey by sea and the whole of the twenty-eight days' journey by wilderness before joining his relatives. THE FIFTH "LIFE," BY PROBUS, PROVES THAT ST. PATRICK WAS BORN IN BONONIA.