Hedwige’s life and work were drawing to an end. Her last public act was one of charity to the dead and comfort to the bereaved living. The bodies of many heroic defenders of their country had been left to rot upon the field of battle. She had these gathered together and buried in consecrated ground, and ordered solemn requiems to be sung for the repose of their souls, while she made herself accessible to every sorrowing widow, mother, sister, or orphan of the dead soldiers, listened to their complaints and laments, comforted and helped them, and brought God’s peace once more into their hearts. After this she prepared herself to die. Her first care was a practical one: she set her affairs in order—a moral duty too often foolishly confounded with worldliness. Then she redoubled her devotions, and, sending for her chaplain, asked to receive Extreme Unction. He demurred, seeing no sign of death about her; but her holiness was so well known that he asked her the reason of her request. “It is a sacrament,” she answered reverently, “which should be received in full consciousness, that we may treat it with due reverence and thankfulness; and I fear that sickness would make me receive it with little or no preparation, and would prevent me from being, as far as possible, worthy of this dying grace. I shall belong to the sick before many days are over, and I would fain be strengthened for the passage through death to the joy of meeting my God.” Her agony was not long, but she seemed to struggle with a fear of death and of the devil’s temptations. When her daughter wished to send for Anna, she said: “No; I shall not die before she comes home” (she was then absent on a visit to her brother, King Wenzel of Bohemia). Her biographers tell us that angels and saints visited her on her death-bed. She died with the veil of her holy niece, Elizabeth of Hungary, wound round her head, and held in her hand, and often to her lips, a little ivory image of the Blessed Virgin. At the very last she was calm and peaceful, blessed her daughter and daughter-in-law, and every nun in the monastery of Trebnitz, her chosen home, and died at evening twilight, on the 15th of October, 1243. Twenty years later the clergy of Silesia, Poland, and Bohemia sent deputies to Rome to beg for her canonization, which Pope Clement IV. proclaimed almost immediately. Many miracles through her intercession were sworn to by credible witnesses, and the neighborhood blossomed with gracious and beautiful legends of the sainted duchess, the mother of the poor and the guardian angel of Silesia. The ceremony of transferring her body to a shrine in the abbey church at Trebnitz in 1268 was the occasion for a national festival; pilgrims flocked in from the remotest districts, and many foreigners came too. Sovereigns and knights, in costly robes and armor, walked in procession to her altar; lay and ecclesiastical pomp was showered upon