Some Crazy Saints
conversed with Christina, whom he survived by many years. Indeed, she died when he was aged twenty-three. Christina the Wonderful was born at the village of Brustheim, near St. Trond in Hesbain, in the year 1150. When aged fifteen she was left an orphan, the youngest of three sisters, and spent her childhood in the fields tending sheep and cows. As now, so then, there were no hedges, and cattle sent into pasture had to be subjected to supervision lest they transgressed into the land of neighbours. Christina was employed as thousands of little girls have been employed since in Germany and Belgium. It was a solitary occupation for a child, and she was thrown much in on herself, on her own thoughts, her own imaginations.
Nothing remarkable about her was observed till she began to pass from childhood into womanhood, a critical period, and then it was that her malady first manifested itself. She fell down one day in a cataleptic fit, and was taken up as dead. Her sisters, with whom she lived, had her washed, laid out, placed on a bier, and conveyed to church, where the funeral mass was ordered to be said.
Christina had been in a cataleptic fit, or had been shamming death. All at once she scattered the funeral party and the worshippers by a leap off her bier, in winding-sheet, with a shrill cry, and then by a scramble up one of the pillars of the sacred edifice, which she managed to surmount. She then got upon one of the tie-beams of the roof, and there seated
197
