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And there, with her five children about her in a happy circle, the kind wolf-mother sat and ate the good things which the Bishop's friends had sent him. But the child she loved best was none of those in furry coats and fine whiskers that looked like her; it was the blue-eyed Saint at the top of the table in his robes of purple and white.
The themes of many of its stories were being told, their characters passing under other names, when Romulus and Remus were suckled by their wolf-mother, before there was a Roman nation or a city named Rome. In the Bible we have many admirable specimens of the short-story.
The Wolf-Mother of Saint Ailbe Ailbe's Babyhood This is the story of a poor little Irish baby whose cruel father and mother did not care anything about him. But because they could not sell him nor give him away they tried to lose him. They wrapped him in a piece of cloth and took him up on the mountain-side, and there they left him lying all alone on a bush of heather.
But it's a mad, bad, heretical sort of fear, the sort of heresy against nature that people ought to be burnt at the stake for believing! This child is no more your child and mine than Jesus was the child of Joseph the carpenter, or or Romulus and Remus were the children of the wolf-mother. We've given him his flesh. We're his foster-parents, if you like.
And when they woke up they began playing again. All day long, and in the evening, the wolf-mother was thinking how the lamb had bleated in the cattle-shed the night before, and how it had smelt of sheep's milk, and she kept snapping her teeth from hunger, and never left off greedily gnawing the old bone, pretending to herself that it was the lamb.
Every day after that, so long as she lived, the old wolf-mother brought her four children to the Bishop's palace and howled at the gate for the porter to let them in. And every day he opened to them, and the steward showed the five into the great dining-hall where Ailbe sat at the head of the table, with five places set for the rest of the family.
It was a sad day for good wolf-mother. But the hunter carried little Ailbe home with him on the horse's back. And he found a new mother there to receive him. Ailbe never knew who his first mother was, but she must have been a bad, cruel woman. His second mother was the kind wolf. And this one, the third, was a beautiful Princess.
The wolf-mother took good care of him and saw that he had the best of everything, for she loved him dearly, indeed. And Ailbe grew stronger and stronger, taller and taller, handsomer and handsomer every day, living his happy life in the wild woods of green Ireland. Ailbe leaves his Forest Home
And she recognized him, too, how I cannot say, for he had changed greatly since she last saw him, a naked little sunbrowned boy. But at any rate, in his fine robes of purple and linen and rich lace, with the mitre on his head and the crozier in his hand, the wolf-mother knew her dear son.
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