Page:History of the Franks.djvu/283

SELECTIONS FROM EIGHT BOOKS OF MIRACLES 251 wind blowing; it was a great conflagration and there began a shouting of men and shrieking of women and crying of children.^ Now this was happening on our own land. My mother, who wore these relics hanging on her neck, learned this, and sprang from the table and lifted up the holy relics against the masses of flame, and aU the fire went out in a moment so that scarcely a spark of fire could be found among the burnt piles of straw and it did no harm to the grain which it had just caught. Many years later I received these relics from my mother ; and when we were going from Burgundy to Auvergne, a great storm came upon us and the sky flashed with many lightnings and roared with heavy crashes of thunder. Then I drew the blessed relics from my bosom and raised my hand against the cloud ; it imme- diately divided into two parts and passed on the right and left and did no harm to us or any one else thereafter. But being a young man of an ardent temperament I began to be puffed up with vain glory and to think silently that this had been granted not so much to the merits of the saints as to me personally, and I openly boasted to my comrades on the journey that I had merited by my blamelessness what God had bestowed. At once my horse suddenly shied beneath me and dashed me to the ground; and I was so severely shaken up by the fall that I could hardly get up. I per- ceived that this had come of vanity, and it was enough to put me on guard thenceforth against being moved by the spur of vain glory. For whenever it happened after that that I had the merit to behold any of the miracles of the saints, I loudly proclaimed that they were wrought by God's gift through faith in the saints. Comparative "Merit" of Gregory and his Mothi:r {Ibid. ch. 85) . . . On this matter I recall what I heard told in my youth. It was the day of the suffering of the great martyr Polycarp, and his festival was being observed at Riom, a village of Auvergne. The reading of the martyrdom had been finished and the other read- ings which the priestly canon requires, and the time came for offer- i"Insequitur clamor vironim strepitusque mulierum, ululatus infantum," — a reminiscence of Vergil, Aen. I, 87, "Insequitur claraorque virum stridorque rudentum.'*