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One door only in the faculty of industrial and mechanical science they did not pass, a heavy oak door at the end of a corridor bearing the painted inscription: Geological and Metallurgical Laboratories. Dr. Boomer looked at the card. "Ah, yes," he said. "Gildas is no doubt busy with his tests. We won't disturb him." The president was always proud to find a professor busy; it looked well.
"Oh!" said I, "you mean that big sphinx moth that is commonly known as the 'death's-head moth. Why the mischief should the people here call it death's messenger?" "For hundreds of years it has been known as death's messenger in St. Gildas," said Max Fortin. "Even Froissart speaks of it in his commentaries on Jacques Sorgue's Chronicles. The book is in your library." "Sorgue?
When attacked and conquered by the Saxons, who originally had been called in as stipendiaries to their assistance, were they not brave? But the strongest argument made use of by those who accuse this nation of cowardice, is, that Gildas, a holy man, and a Briton by birth, has handed down to posterity nothing remarkable concerning them, in any of his historical works.
Those women, according to the tradition, are natives of the islands, who, marrying strangers, and dying in their sins, have returned to their beloved birthplace to beg the prayers of their friends." Another superstition was recalled. "At the seaside village of St. Gildas, the fishermen who lead evil lives are often disturbed at midnight by three knocks at their door from an invisible hand.
We have more rhetoric and more homilies about the "deserted cities and the wickedness of men and the evil life of the Kings;" but that you might hear at any period. Here let us turn the light of common sense on to these most imperfect, confused and few facts which Gildas gives us. Well, all we get from St. Gildas himself and possibly a few vague legends.
But the Celtic element triumphed. Gildas, about A.D. 540, describes a Britain confined to the west of our island, which is very largely Celtic and not Roman. Had the English invaded the island from the Atlantic, we might have seen a different spectacle. The Celtic element would have perished utterly: the Roman would have survived.
Gildas was not a man to give way to sudden wrath; he took the child by the ear, drew him outside, and said to him, gently, "Ker, my little Ker, I know what you are attempting and what tempts you to make the effort; but God does not wish it, nor I either, my little Ker." "I do it," replied the boy, "because my dear mother is so poor." "Your mother is what she is; she has what God gives her.
But when the Black Priest lay in the crypt of Plougastel, his master Satan came at night and set him free, and carried him across land and sea to Mahmoud, which is Soldan or Saladin. And I, Jacques Sorgue, traveling afterward by sea, beheld with my own eyes my kinsman, the Black Priest of St. Gildas, borne along in the air upon a vast black wing, which was the wing of his master Satan.
He had some tradition of the coming of the English about 450, and of the reason why they came. But his knowledge of anything previous to that event was plainly most imperfect. Germ. Gildas is, however, rather more Celtic in tone than Mommsen seems to allow. Such a phrase as ita ut non Britannia sed Romania censeretur implies a consciousness of contrast between Briton and Roman.
But he was a smart young man, dressed in the latest fashion with brown boots and a crosswise tie, and he knew more about money and business and the stock exchange in five minutes than Professor Gildas in his whole existence. "Why not?" said the professor. "Why, don't you see what's happened?" "Eh?" said Gildas. "What happened to those first samples?
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