to wash the feet of her spiritual children, and to serve them at table, and she did this when she herself was fasting. Her countenance was truly angelic, always sweet and joyful, though she never indulged in laughter. No one ever saw her angry, and her aspect agreed with her name, which in Saxon signifies the Beloved, and in Greek, Philomena.”[67] It was in 748 that the letters from St. Boniface reached Wimbourne, requesting that Lioba, Thecla, and Walburga might be sent over to him, together with as many of their companions as might be willing to share in their enterprise. Thirty nuns at once offered themselves, and the little colony, after a stormy passage across the sea to Antwerp,[68] was met at Mentz by the archbishop, who proceeded to establish Lioba in a monastery he had built for her at Bischoffsheim, where she very soon collected a numerous congregation of holy virgins. Walburga went on to Thuringia, where her brother, Winibald, was superior of seven houses of monks. He had long purposed retiring to some greater solitude, and, with the advice of his brother, he chose a wild valley in the diocese, clothed with majestic forests and watered by mountain streams. It bore the name of Heidensheim; and here, in 752, Winibald, having cleared the ground, erected a church and two monasteries, one for himself and his monks, the other for Walburga’s community. The savage natives beheld with jealous eyes this intrusion into their solitudes, and the destruction of their sacred oaks; but ere a few years had passed, the minster of Heidensheim stood in the centre of a Christian population, and the wild pagan forest had been converted into a smiling land of woods and pastures, where all the arts of civilised life were taught and practised in a society over which the abbot presided with something like paternal sway.