So faithfully did Guarin carry out the penance imposed that he crawled for seven years about the mountain that he had once illumined with his sanctity, living on grubs and roots and becoming to all intents and purposes a wild animal. One day Count Wilfred, while out hunting, noticed this strange beast and had him taken to his stables at Barcelona. There Guarin abode some months, saying never a word but pleasing his captors by his docility. One day he was led into the castle to amuse the Count and his Court. But before he could perform any tricks, the infant son of the Count, a baby but three months old, cried out, “Arise Guarin, for God has pardoned you.” Whereupon the strange beast rose up on his hind legs, praising God, and confessing his enormous crimes. In these days men were very much alive, and thrilled to the passions of love and hate. But, touched by the miracle, the Count forgave the murderer of his daughter, and set out with him for Montserrat to disinter the body buried seven years before. But lo, when the fair form was revealed, it throbbed with life, and a red line only showed where her head had been severed from her neck. Richildis was so grateful for her restoration to life that she determined to devote the rest of it to the service of God. The Count founded a monastery for both sexes, of which his daughter was abbess and Guarin became a humble lay-brother. A mere fairy tale, yet it is full of what was best in the mediæval spirit--the conviction that no misfortune was irreparable, no crime unredeemable, no sinner unreclaimable, that for all men and all things there was indeed mercy and plentiful redemption. Upon the invasion of the Arabs in 976 the nuns abandoned their convent, but the monastery remained and was recognised as a regular community about the time of Fernando and Isabel. It is not, of course, to pray before the shrine of Guarin that pilgrims climb the ragged sides of the saw-edged mountain. Long before the hermit immortalised his name by his crime and his repentance, a miraculous image of the Virgin, said to have been carved by St. Luke, and brought to Spain by St. Peter, had been hidden, to save it from the infidels, in one of the caverns. Nearly two hundred years after, its whereabouts was revealed to some shepherds by lights and mysterious melodies. These manifestations were repeated every Saturday--that being the day of the week specially consecrated to the Virgin by the Church. The Bishop came over to investigate the phenomenon, and on entering the cave whence the sounds proceeded, they found the heavy image carved by St. Luke. So heavy was it that it resisted all efforts to remove it; so there it remained till the end of the sixteenth century, when it was found possible to enshrine it in the present church.