"'The story that I am going to tell you now shall bear the heading, "The Hearts of the Children turned to the Fathers." I read it with a deal of trouble in an old, yellowed manuscript which the mice had gnawed at. But it bears so entirely the impress of truth that it may speak for itself, although the things happened more than a thousand years ago. I would rather, if I could, give it again exactly as it stood written in that manuscript; but I am unable to do so, because I only made extracts from it. I found the MS. in the library of the Town House at Lüneburg, where I was staying for a few days just then, and with the permission of both the burgomasters of the city, I searched the Town House library through. When later I came to live in Lüneburg for many years, these and other old MSS. were no longer to be found; and I heard that a Jew, to whom the burgomasters had sold a number of old suits of armour and weapons, had probably demanded to have these manuscripts into the bargain, thinking that he might in England dispose of them for a high price. The MS. was entitled: "Res gestæ Landolfi, Apostoli Salzonum, qui Horzæ ripas ad habitant;" _i.e._, "_Acts of Landolf, the apostle to the Saxons who lived on the Oerze_." I have told you already many things about this Landolf. It has been mentioned that he built the first wooden church in this whole region of country, there where the heathen god Woden's place of sacrifice had been; which place, under the name of the "cold church," still belongs to the Hermannsburg glebe, ever since the church was burned down in a predatory inroad of the Wends, and Hermann Billing built the stone parish church in Hermannsburg. I have told you too of this Landolf, how he had gradually converted the whole region to Christianity, like a skilful general, consecrating to the Christian faith for the worship of the true God, precisely those places where the heathen had been wont to adore their false idols, so that the triumph of Christianity could in nothing have been more forcibly manifested than in this founding of Christian altars and chapels on the very places where previously the heathen abominations had been enacted.