In order to introduce clerical learning and morals into Silesia and Poland, it was necessary to rely upon Germans, as has often been the case in other countries, where a foreign element has been, for some time at least, synonymous with civilization. In England Italians chiefly, in a less degree Normans, and in one signal instance a Greek,[12] brought with them the knowledge of church architecture and chant, besides secular learning; Irish missionaries had before that helped on the Britons, and Saxons, later on, carried the same influence across the sea to heathen Germany, who in her turn became the evangelizer of the Slav nations. Still later, when Poland was as fervent a Catholic country as Germany, another Hedwige (the name had then grown to be a national one) converted the Lithuanians and became the mother of the Jagellon dynasty. Here, on the confines of Russia, the Latin Church stood face to face with the Greek, and the tide of progress and conversion was stayed. Then came the perpetual turmoils with the warlike Turks, till religion became rather an affair of the knight than of the missionary, until that wave of circumstances having passed away, and the Turks having sunk from the height of their military renown to the insignificance of a mongrel and undisciplined crowd, the battle between faith and scepticism—the modern form of heathenism—has shifted to a great degree to the arena of the mind. The Lepanto of our day is being fought out as obstinately on paper as that of three hundred years ago was on sea; of its nature it cannot be as short or as decisive, but it is nevertheless the counterpart—and the only worthy one—of that romantic and daring feat of arms. The struggle in the days of Hedwige was in some sense much narrower; but though her husband and son engaged in it rather as blind instruments than far-seeing directors, she, with the instincts of her sex and her habitual union with God, helped in it as a teacher and missionary. She proved her gift for it first upon her household, then, in the years of her retirement, upon her special charge—some young heathen girls, natives of Prussia, whom she taught herself and provided for in life. One of these, Catherine, to whom she was godmother, she married to her trusty chamberlain, Schavoine, and left them the estate of that name after her death. But notwithstanding her thirst for doing good and her high idea of her duty to her subjects, she thoroughly enjoyed the quiet of home-life, away from the court, and, whenever it was practicable, would spend some weeks at a time with her young husband and her children at Lähnhaus. It is here that her memory lives freshest at present; here that she tended her dovecot, which is brought to mind by the yearly market of doves, unique of its kind, still held at Lähn on Ash-Wednesday; here that she and her favorite doe crossed the Hedwigsteig, a rough, rocky pathway, to the Chapel of the Hermit and the image of the Blessed Virgin, which afterwards