But as you went eastward through Europe confusion increased and manners grew rougher; primitive standards of right and wrong existed under the name of the law of the strongest; and whatever generosity human nature displayed was an untutored impulse, a half-heathen quality guided by a natural sense of honor rather than by fixed rules of morality. The Slavs, the Czechs, and the Magyars were magnificent barbarians, as the Franks and Teutons of four centuries earlier had been—Christians, indeed, and as fiercely so as Clovis when he drew his sword at the first recital of the Passion and exclaimed, “Would to God I and my Franks had been there”; but unrestrained and wild, more generous than obedient towards the church, which they would rather endow and defend than curb their passions in accordance with its teachings—splendid material, but an unwrought mine. Bishops and priests had fallen into loose ways among them and lost the respect of the people; vassals of the great lords, they stood on much the same level as the secular clergy at present do in Russia, and the popes had long striven in vain to make them give up marriage when they took Holy Orders. The parish clergy were mostly ignorant men, often employed in common labor to support their families, while of teaching monasteries or any places where learning was imparted and respected there were very few. Hedwige came from a well-regulated country, where church dignitaries were the equals of civil ones, where the Roman standard was paramount, and churchmen were looked upon as powerful and learned men. Monasteries for both sexes abounded; Hedwige herself had been brought up by the Benedictines at Kitzingen, where her special friend and teacher, Petrussa, many years afterwards, followed her into Silesia and became the first abbess of the monastery of Trebnitz, near Breslau. Hedwige, whose mind was from her earliest years in advance of her time, and who mastered all the accomplishments of a woman of high station at that day before she was twelve years old, set herself the task of bettering her adopted country as soon as she had entered it. The men of that time knew less than the women; for their education, unless they were destined for the church, was purely military. Ecclesiastics were lawyers, doctors, authors, travellers, _savants_, poets, and schoolmasters; while the majority of laymen were only soldiers. But the women of corresponding birth were taught Latin and a good deal of medicine, besides household knowledge, embroidery, the national literature, music, and painting. For the times this was no unworthy curriculum. They had a practical knowledge of surgery and of the healing herbs of the field—which, in days when the chances of life and death often hung on the possibility of reaching or finding a physician within the radius of forty or fifty miles, was a very valuable gift—and an equally practical and useful acquaintance with all the details of housekeeping. Nothing in those days