partnership with some other young men, acquired a fourth share in the profits of one trading-vessel and half the ownership of another. Very soon his partners made him captain of the ship. In the long, blank days of his boyhood by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern the face of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper, fitted him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful merchant. The young sailor’s heart, however, was not wholly set upon money-getting. As he tramped over the fens with his pack upon his back he had been wont to soothe his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed learnt at his mother’s knee; as he guided his bark through the storm, or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out for such prey, he did not miss the lesson specially addressed to those who “go down to the sea in ships.” Wherever his business took him--Scotland, Britanny, Flanders, Denmark--he sought out the holy places of the land and made his offerings there. One of the places he visited most frequently was S. Andrews; and on his way back from thence he rarely failed to turn aside to S. Cuthbert’s old home at Holy Isle and his yet more lonely retreat at Farne, there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation upon the hermit-life which he was already longing to imitate. At last he took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return, weary of independence, he became steward to a rich man who intrusted him with the whole management of his household; soon, however, he grew so disgusted with the thievery among the servants, which he saw but could not prevent, and with the master’s indifference to it, that he threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage, first to S. Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came home to his parents, but he could not stay; he must go back yet a third time, he told them, to the threshold of the Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied him. At a period when religious men of greater experience in this world’s affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations over the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she still cast over this simple English rustic the spell which she had cast of old over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was in the land of Wilfrid and Benedict, in the wild Northumbria, with its long reaches of trackless moor and its mighty forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild beasts, that Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought it first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western borders of the moors, just beginning a new life after its conquest by William Rufus. His hopes of remaining there in obscurity were, however, defeated by the recognition of a kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King’s colonists, and he fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and months of lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly