arriving at the foot of that mountain, she mounted to its summit, and stood where Moses had stood to view the Promised Land, and then she fell upon her knees, offering up her heart in praise and fervent prayer. Thence she passed to Mount Tabor, whence Moses viewed the Promised Land, and the mountain on which Christ Himself had prayed. Etheria took several years to accomplish this pilgrimage, and all the time she thought with longing of her far-off home. “It is marvellous,” cries Valerius, “how much she endured and how much she went through”; it is a story to confound the proud, a story to show how God chooses His weakest vessels, passing by the strong, to show what the human breast can endure when filled with the love of Christ. The world itself was the theatre of her undertaking; seas, rivers, and mountains were the steps she trod. “What,” he asks, “must have been the force of that love which so many waters failed to quench? with what firm hope did Etheria pass through all those different countries with their different races and different customs, and many of them barbarians! What must have been the faith that could have preserved her intrepid to the end!” “_Usque in finem irrevocabili audacia procul dubio perpetravit._” This, according to Florez, was Etheria’s greatest triumph, and Valerius said in his day that, not desiring to have rest in this world, but rather to enter into eternity palm in hand, she even maltreated her own body that she might prepare her soul for heaven and make it spotless. She made herself “a pilgrim upon earth, that she might rest in heaven and stand with the choir of virgins round their glorious Queen.” Valerius does not say where she died, but he adds that she reached her house in safety. He related all this to the monks, that, at the thought of such heroic virtue on the part of one of the weaker sex, they might be ashamed of their own half-heartedness and shortcomings, and beware lest, at the coming of the Bridegroom, Etheria’s lamp might be found brightly trimmed and their own be extinguished for lack of oil. Florez based his conjecture, as to Etheria having been a native of Galicia, on Valerius’s statement that she was a native of territory in the west bordering upon the Ocean. “_Extremo occidui maris Oceani littore exorta._” But nearly a hundred years after the death of Florez, an Italian, M. Gamurrini,[53] made a very interesting discovery. He found in the year 1883, in an Arezzo manuscript, part of a long account of Etheria’s pilgrimage written by herself. Three years later he published it in book form under the title of _Sanctae Silvae Acquitanae peregrinatio ad loca sancta_. This manuscript, written in the second half of the fourth century, had till that moment remained unknown to any but a small circle of devotees to early Christian literature.