Another of the stories which has a half fairy-tale character is that of the martyrdom of the little S. Christina, who was shut up in a high tower by her father, and bidden spend her time before gold and silver gods; his private purpose being to keep her out of the way of troublesome lovers. Christina tired of her divine playthings, and in spite of her father’s indulgence, since he obligingly took away all the images but three, would have nothing to do with false gods. She was visited by angels and instructed in Christianity. She combined courage in her new faith with a fine spirit of adventure; for she is represented as smashing the idols, letting herself down by a rope from her tower-prison, distributing the fragments of the idols among the poor, and clambering up again before morning. Her martyrdom showed various ingenious inventions of torture, but the odd part of the story is the manner in which the gold and silver idols always suggest a girl’s playthings. We are told that when she was taken into the temple of Apollo she bade the idol step down and walk about the temple until she sent it back to its place. Then, proceeds the story gravely, she was put in a cradle filled with boiling pitch and oil, and four soldiers were set to rocking her. In these and similar stories which abound in the Acta Sanctorum, the simple attributes of childish nature rarely shine through the more formal covering of churchly investiture. Nature could not always be expelled, but the imagination, busy with the construction of the ideal Christian life, was more concerned, as time went on, to make that conform to an ecclesiastical standard. It is pathetic to see the occasional struggle of poor humanity to break through the meshes in which it was entangled. The life of S. Francis of Assisi is full of incidents which illustrate this. His familiar intercourse with birds and beasts was but one of the signs of an effort to escape from the cage in which he was an unconscious prisoner. One night, we are told, he rose suddenly from the earthen floor which made his bed and rushed out into the open air. A brother monk, who was praying in his cell, looked through his window and saw S. Francis, under the light of the moon, fashion seven little figures of snow. “Here is thy wife,” he said to himself: “these four are thy sons and daughters; the other two are thy servant and handmaid: and for all these thou art bound to provide. Make haste, then, and provide clothing for them, lest they perish with cold. But if the care of so many trouble thee, be thou careful to serve the Lord alone.” The injunction to give up father and mother and family for the Lord’s sake, when obeyed by one so tremulously alive to human sympathy as was S. Francis, had in it a power suddenly to disclose the depths of the human soul; nor can it be doubted that those who, like S. Francis, were eagerly thrusting aside everything which seemed to stand between them and the realization of the divine life paid