This is a very interesting passage, and points to Patrick's mode of procedure, when he found a youth suitable for the ecclesiastical state. This boy was, we are told,[137] the son of Bronach, daughter of Milchu, with whom Patrick himself had spent the years of his own captivity at the same occupation--herding swine. Patrick had been probably acquainted with the mother of this youth; he remembered his own boyhood, which he spent in the midst of many sorrows and much labour on the barren slopes of Slemish; so his heart was touched, and he preached the new Gospel of peace and love to this grandson of the master who had held him so long in bondage. The boy's heart, too, was touched by grace--he believed, was baptized, and tonsured. The tonsuring, if it took place then, could only mean that Patrick destined the youth for the sacred ministry. We are also told that he gave him a copy of the Gospels, doubtless when he had learned to read a little Latin, and a _menister_, which Stokes strangely translates 'credence-table,' but which is manifestly a loan-word from the Latin _ministerium_,[138] and signifies the chalice and paten necessary for offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Later on this youth became a bishop, he was consecrated by Patrick himself, and Patrick gave him this crozier--a heavenly gift--which came to be known from that circumstance as the _Etech_, or flying crozier of Mochae of Noendrum. This name is simply Oendrum with the article prefixed, and the island in which Mochae founded his monastery and school was so called because it was formed as it were of a single hill or rising ground--_oen-druim_--the one-ridged island. It is now corrupted into Mahee Island from the name of its holy founder, which still survives in the mouth of the 'stranger' though its origin is quite forgotten. The island contains about 170 acres of land, and is situated not more than a quarter of a mile from the western shore of Strangford Lough, anciently known as Lough Cuan. The saint built his monastery and church on the very summit of the ridge, which rises to about the height of sixty feet, and commands a fine view of the far-reaching inland sea, whose western marge especially is studded with pleasant islets and bordered by many a grassy down and fertile field, rich, when we saw them, with the promise of abundant harvests. The original edifice was, as we gather from a story in the saint's life, constructed of wood, which he helped to hew down himself and carry on his own shoulders. The later buildings, however, were of stone, and the church--for many centuries a cathedral church--was 58 feet long by 22 wide. Only its foundations can now be traced; but the castle on the summit of the hill, and the outer concentric earthworks that were thrown up to protect it, can still be seen. During the Danish incursions it suffered much, and a small round tower was built as usual near the church's western door to afford an asylum to the monks. A small portion of it still