salvation to all who would embrace it” were welcomed by King Arviragus, who assigned to St. Joseph the Isle of Avalon as a retreat. When Joseph and his little Christian band, passing over Stone Down where stand the two notable Avalon Oaks, came to the place, weary with long travelling, they rested on the ridge of a hill, which in its name of Weary-all Hill (really Worall) is supposed to commemorate this incident; and where the saint’s staff touched the sod, a thorn tree miraculously sprang up, and every Christmas Day it buds and blossoms as a memorial of our Lord, and of the first Christian festival.[31] Another story says that the saint was met by a boisterous mob of the heathen, and that, planting his pilgrim’s staff in the earth, he knelt down to pray; and as he prayed, the hard, dry staff began to bud and give forth fragrance, and became a living tree. Then said Joseph, “Our God is with us,” and the heathen, transfixed by the miracle, were convinced and pacified. So runs the earliest Christian legend in England, and as a fitting sequel we learn that not long after Joseph’s mission had begun the first Christian chapel was built, and occupied part of the site on which the most beautiful of holy houses was afterwards reared--Glastonbury Abbey. St. Joseph’s Chapel, magnificent in ruin, is one of those hallowed places in which one might spend hours in silent contemplation. Through many centuries the legend of the Holy Thorn has been preserved, and Glastonbury has remained distinguished by the fact that there the “winter thorn” has blossomed every Christmas “mindful of our Lord,” or, as a pupil of Caxton’s wrote in 1520-- “The hawthornes also that groweth in Werall Do burge and bere green leaves at Christmas As fresh as other in May.” The tree was regarded with great awe and superstition by the inhabitants, and when the change in the calendar was made they looked to the “sacra spina” for confirmation of the righteousness of what had been done. Many people refused to celebrate the new-style Christmas Day because the Thorn showed no blossoms, and when the white flowers appeared on January 5th, the old-style Christmas was held to have been divinely sanctioned. A trunk of the tree was cut down by a Puritan soldier, though his sacrilege caused him to be severely wounded by a piece of the dismembered tree striking him; but when the Thorn was cast into the river as dead and worthless it miraculously took root again. The spot where it grew is marked by a monumental stone bearing the inscription:--I. A. A.D. XXXI. [Illustration: ST. JOSEPH’S CHAPEL, GLASTONBURY ABBEY [_To face p. 224_]