Ireland in his twentieth year, attracted by the excellent science which then flourished in her schools, and the fame of his learned countryman. It appears probable that the two Ewalds, martyred in Friesland in 695, were likewise pupils or friends of Egbert’s, for Bede tells us that they were living strangers in Ireland for the sake of the eternal kingdom; that both were pious, but that Black Ewald was the more learned of the two. Wilibrord departed for Friesland in 696, accompanied by twelve fellow-missionaries; and the protection of Pepin, who then ruled the Franks as mayor of the palace to the Merovingian monarch, enabled him to pursue his apostolic career in spite of the opposition of Radbod, the Pagan duke of the country. It would be pleasant, did space permit it, to say something of his labours;--to relate how he found his way into Denmark and brought away thirty young Danes, whom he sent to be instructed in the schools which he had founded at Treves and Utrecht; how on his voyage back to Friesland he landed at Heligoland, the holy island of the Saxons, but which then bore the name of Fosetesland, from the hideous idol to whose worship it was dedicated. It was a wild, mysterious spot. No animals that had once grazed on its sacred herbage were suffered to be molested, and near the altar of the god a clear stream bubbled up of which the natives never drank save in awful silence, for the utterance of a single word would, as they believed, bring down on them the vengeance of the dreaded Fosete. Wilibrord caused some of the cattle to be killed for food, and baptized three converts in the fountain, over the waters of which he broke the mystic silence by pronouncing the invocation of the Holy Trinity. This daring act excited the direful wrath of Radbod, and on the death of Pepin, in 714, Wilibrord found himself forced to leave the country. He was, however, reinstated in his bishopric of Utrecht by Charles Martel, and in 717 we find him engaged in destroying another Frisian idol in the isle of Walcheren.