following the cart and tearfully entreat him to return. The rest of the people, who would have thrown stones but for their fear of the police, accompanied their departure with prolonged howls and hisses. Dr. Macias relates this story in order, he explains, to warn future archæologists that the modern citizens of the Forum Limicorum are as superstitious as were the Romans who refused to cross the river Limia at the command of Brutus. In the prologue of the chronicle of Idatius we read these words: “Idatius Provinciae Gallaeciae natus in Lemica Civitate,[42] mage divino munerequam proprio merito summi Praesul creatus officii,” etc. “Neither in his prologue nor in the years 431 and 462 of his chronicle,” says Dr. Macias, “where he speaks of himself as a bishop, does he once mention the name of his diocese; neither is it given us by St. Isidore or by Rodrigo, Archbishop of Toledo, when they speak of Idatius.” Dr. Macias reminds his readers that the fact of Idatius’s having been a native of Limica in no way proves that he was ever a bishop of that city. He is generally mentioned as “a bishop of Galicia” simply. Idatius gives no clue in his chronicle as to the date of his own birth, but we know that it was towards the close of his life that he sorrowfully wrote, _lacrymabile propriae et vita tempus_--and _ut extremus plagae, ita extremus et vitae_. These words were written by him in connection with the events of the year 469, the last year of those included in the chronicle. Dr. Macias adds that if he was about eighty years of age when he finished his chronicle, he must have been born about the year 390. The Portuguese writer Jorge Cardoso states in his _Hagiologio_ that Idatius was of the race of the Sueves; but, as it happens, these people did not invade the Peninsula till twenty years later. Dr. Macias is sure, moreover, that the fact of the name being foreign to the Latin tongue indicates that he was not a Roman but a _Limico_ of the Hispano-Galaic race. While still young--_adhuc infantulus_, or, as he says in another place, _et infantulus et pupillus_--he was taken to the East, either by his father or some other member of his family, and there he met St. Jerome, St. John, St. Eulogius, and St. Theophilus (bishops respectively of Jerusalem and Alexandria). His pilgrimage, as he calls it, could not have lasted longer than the year 402, when he was about twelve or fourteen years old, for he says he cannot give the dates of the deaths of St. Jerome and the other Fathers--among whom he mentions St. Epiphanius, who, we know, died in 402. In his shorter chronicle, _Cronicon pequeño_, we read that Idatius was converted to Christianity in the year 416,--“Idatii ad Dominum conversio peccatoris,”--and that eleven years afterwards he was elected bishop. Macias, like Florez, explains that the words _conversio ad Dominum_ do not mean that he was converted from heathendom to Christianity, but that, till then a layman, he now entered the Church.