At the tidings of his herd, Dichu was prepared to slay the strangers, but when he looked upon the face of Patrick he changed his mind and offered hospitality. Then Patrick preached to him and he believed, the first convert won by the apostle in the land of the Scots. [Illustration: Part of the Kingdom of ULIDIA. _R. & R. Clark, Ltd. Edinburgh._] Before we ask the questions that naturally rise in the mind when we hear a tale like this, we must accompany the saint on a further stage in his progress. He tarried with Dichu only a few days, for he was impatient to carry out a purpose which he cherished of revisiting the scene of his thraldom and the home of his old master Miliucc in the extreme north of Dalaradia. He left his boat in the keeping of Dichu and journeyed by land through the country of the Picts till he saw once more the slopes of Mount Miss. Miliucc still lived, and Patrick wished to pay the master from whom he had fled the price of his freedom. It is not suggested that he deemed it necessary, even after so many years, thus to legalise his liberty and secure himself against the claim of a master to seize a fugitive slave. The suggestion seems rather to be that he hoped to convert Miliucc to the Christian doctrine, and that the best means of conciliation was to recognise his right. But the heathen chief, hearing that he was approaching with this intent, and seized with a strange alarm lest his former slave should by some irresistible spell constrain him to embrace a new religion against his will, resorted to an extreme device. Having gathered all his substance together into his wooden house, he set fire to the building, and perished with it. The flames of the unexpected pyre met Patrick’s eyes as he stood on the south-western side of Mount Miss,[78] and his biographer pictures him standing for two or three hours dumb with surprise and grief. “I know not, God knows,” he said, using a favourite phrase, “whether the posterity of this man shall not serve others for ever, and no king arise from his seed.” Then he turned back and retraced his steps to the habitation of Dichu. The funeral pyre of Mount Miss[79] sends our thoughts over sea and land to a more famous pyre at Sardis. The self-immolation of the obscure Dalaradian kingling belongs to the same cycle of lore as that of the great Lydian monarch whose name became a proverb for luxury and wealth. Croesus built a timber death-pile in the court of his palace to escape the shame of servitude to an earthly conqueror; Miliucc sought the flames to avoid the peril of thraldom under a ghostly master. But in both cases the idea of a king dying solemnly by fire is taken from some old religious usage and introduced by legendary fancy into an historical situation. And in this case fancy has wrought well and fitly. The desperate pyre of Miliucc is a pathetic symbol of the protest of a doomed religion. * * * * * [Sidenote: IN THE ISLAND-PLAIN]