Margaret, the mother of the poor, the consoler of the afflicted, looking upon her subjects as a large family committed to her charge by providence, underwent constant privations that she might have more to distribute in alms; she relieved sufferers before they had time to ask for help; inquired into hidden distress; sought out the insolvent debtors in order to free them from their liabilities; ransomed the prisoners of war, and visited constantly the hospitals which she had endowed or founded. Before sitting down to table, she washed the feet and dressed the wounds of the sick poor, while nine orphans and twenty-four widows or aged persons were always partakers of her meals. During Advent and Lent she had as many as three hundred at her table. Her daughter Matilda, who was also canonised, survived her more than twenty-six years (1118). She founded two hospitals in London, and took great pleasure in visiting them, and tending the inmates with her own hands. [Illustration: Fig. 270.--St. Elizabeth of Hungary, going to relieve the poor, suddenly sees the folds of her cloak covered with roses in full bloom.--From a Painting by Fra Angelico in the Academy of Fine Arts at Perugia (Fifteenth Century).] Before her day there was another St. Matilda, who was early instructed in the exercise of charity, first by her august mother, and afterwards by her grandmother, abbess of a convent at Erfurt, where she spent several years: she was a woman of true piety. She married the Emperor Henry, surnamed the Fowler, and owing to the wars in which her husband was constantly engaged, the regency was often entrusted to her. When she had resigned these high functions, which were very burdensome to her, she again became the influential adviser of the emperor, the counsellor of justice, the minister of clemency, and the friend of the unfortunate. Left a widow, she retired, when her son succeeded his father on the throne, to her favourite convent of Northausen, a vast charitable foundation in which three thousand maidens belonging to the first families of Germany passed their lives in holy meditation, and in the relief of human suffering. Her three children, the Emperor Otho I., the Archbishop Bruno, the apostle of Germany, and Queen Gerberga, wife of Louis d’Outremer, King of France, reflected the virtues of their mother; but the memory of St. Matilda of Germany was still more vividly awakened in the person of her grand-daughter St. Adelaide, and of her great-grand-daughter Emma, wife of King Lothair. Under the Emperor Henry II., surnamed the Pious, and the Empress Cunegunda, charitable establishments, hospitals, houses of relief, and places of refuge increased very largely, and when Conrad came to the throne at the death of Henry II., the empress-regent retired to the convent of Kaffung, which she had founded in the diocese of Paderborn, and devoted herself to the service of the poor and the sick who were under the special care of this institution.