were then, although Posen can point to a short and dazzling career between the two eras of persecution. It is impossible here to recount the various and sad events that led up to the death of Henry. He died in 1238, at the age of seventy, under the ban of excommunication, which was only partially removed, and deprived to the last of the presence of his saintly wife. The scene of the return of his body to the abbey church at Trebnitz was heartrending. The nuns and vassals, no less than his widow and children, looked upon him as their stay and their protector; they bewailed him with genuine grief as their benefactor, and buried him with all imaginable respect and pomp as their founder. Hedwige’s life as a widow became more penitential than before. After her death a hair-shirt and a belt with small, sharp points turned inwards were found on her body; but these she had worn for many years before her widowhood. Her cloister-life, however, was not her only one, for she watched with intelligent interest the politics of the time, the great events, and even the less obtrusive details, whose consequences to the cause of good might afterwards be manifold; and above all she lived in her son, Henry the Pious, a worthy and able sovereign, whose reign was to be short, stormy, and glorious. In January, 1241, the Tartars, under their chiefs Batu and Peta, having previously desolated Russia, fell with nearly three hundred thousand fighting men upon Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, and Poland. The King of Hungary, Bela, was beaten by Batu, while Peta besieged, took, and burnt Cracow on his way to Silesia. The King of Bohemia, Wenzel, brought as large an army as he could to defend his frontiers, while Henry gathered thirty thousand men in his father’s city of refuge, Liegnitz, waiting to attack Peta on his road to Breslau. Trebnitz was in dire confusion; monasteries always fell the first prey to the heathen invaders, and the nuns judged it prudent to scatter themselves and claim each the protection of her own family, while Hedwige, with her daughter, the Abbess Gertrude, and her daughter-in-law, Anna, shut themselves up in the strong castle of Crossen on the Oder. Before she left she gave her son a scarf, or rather sword-belt, embroidered with her own hands, which he received as an omen of good-fortune, cheering her with hopes of his speedy and victorious return, while the stricken, heroic mother feared but too surely that she should never see his face again. All Breslau retired within the citadel to await the attack, and Henry tried to intercept the foe on his way. He drew up his army on some high ground just outside the walls—Wahlstatt, a good battle-ground, as he judged—and himself gave the signal to attack the oncoming foe. He commanded the main body, while lesser brother-sovereigns directed the wings; but the irresistible might of numbers, which was the chief reliance of the Tartars, bore down all opposition, as a whirlwind does the densest forest.