[Illustration: THE ABBEY CHURCH, FOREST.] Of these heroic men and women we know hardly anything for certain save their names. They lived in that age of legend and mystery during which Paganism was making its last stand against the victorious onslaught of the new faith. If their actions were recorded by contemporary writers, the manuscripts were destroyed by the barbarian hordes who scourged the land in the course of the nine hundreds--and the biographies of later writers, compiled as they must have been from hearsay evidence, and after ample time had elapsed for the legends to grow, are little more than a fascinating texture of folklore and myth--naïve and beautiful fairy tales, of which the most that can be said of them is that, perhaps, they are founded on fact. But if there are no authentic chronicles of the lives of the early saints of Brabant, we know that their lives were not lived in vain; the bountiful harvest which was reaped by after generations bears witness to the excellence of the seed which these men had sown, and to the care and the diligence with which they and their successors had tended it; and after all the ecclesiastical seal of canonisation has been in most cases, especially in these early days, the outcome rather than the cause of popular devotion. As Taine shrewdly notes, man is too envious and too egoistical to lavish gratitude where none is due, and the estimation in which they were held by the people is sufficient proof of their sterling worth. We see them pale, shadowy, vague, like the white cloud which hovered over the battlefield of Louvain, but the victors saw in that white cloud, 'la benoite vierge Marie et Saint Lambert avec Monsieur Saint Pierre semblant de vouloir secourir le peuple Chrétien,' and so heartened were they by the vision that they put to flight the Pagan host, and no less fruitful in results are the forgotten lives and the forgotten labours of those great pioneers of civilisation who to-day are for us but as beautiful phantoms. [Illustration: BY THE DYLE, AT MECHLIN.] CHAPTER II _The Norsemen and Louvain_ The victory of Louvain (Sept. 10, 891) marks an epoch in the history of Brabant. The Danes under Rolf the Ganger, who later on became first Duke of Normandy, were utterly routed, and though they succeeded in rallying their forces and for a few months continued their devastations in the Ardennes, Brabant at least was free of them, and after the storming of 'a certain stronghold newly constructed upon an exceeding high mountain whither a vast multitude of them had taken refuge,' the Pagan host was disbanded and as if by enchantment melted away. Perhaps the peasants, descendants of men who had been driven to the font, had at first lent assistance to the invaders, and that now at last convinced that Thor was not mighty enough to withstand Christ they had withdrawn their co-operation.