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Tradition tells us he was the uncle of Saint Patrick of Ireland. Churches were dedicated to him in France, Germany, Scotland and England. The festival of his birth is celebrated on the eleventh of November. In Scotland this day still marks the winter term, which is called Martinmas. Saint Martin's shrine was one of the most famous of the middle ages, and was noted for its wonderful cures.

Occasionally it accommodated the casual traveller who took the valley road to the north, but it was intended for the dalesmen, who came there after the darkness had gathered in, and drank a pot of home-brewed ale as they sat above the red turf fire. This was the house to which Wilson's body had been carried on the morning it was found on the road. That was about Martinmas.

'That sounds like nonsense, my dear. 'May be so, my dear; but it may be very good law for all that. I am sure, speaking of term-days, I wish, as Frank Kennedy says, that Whitsunday would kill Martinmas and be hanged for the murder; for there I have got a letter about that interest of Jenny Cairns's, and deil a tenant's been at the Place yet wi' a boddle of rent, nor will not till Candlemas.

She will call up the servants, and 'fend and prove, and make complaints and regrets, and in the long end have all on her own side. And I can tell you that Ann has been queer lately, and Elizabeth talks of leaving at Martinmas. O Charlotte! put up with things, my dear. There is only you to help me." Charlotte could not resist such appeals.

She was sitting in the little farm-house beside the mill, buried in the green depths of the valley of Combe, half-way between Stow and Chapel, sulking as much as her sweet nature would let her, at being thus shut out from all the grand doings at Bideford, and forced to keep a Martinmas Lent in that far western glen.

No doubt a pious commentator can successfully unravel all the threads of the plot, but the spectator demands that a play should be clearly and easily intelligible. The audience, however, is sorely puzzled by the events of this awful third night after Martinmas, and resents the obscurity of all this intrigue by candlelight. Why do the various persons meet at Östraat? Who sends them?

All this happened at a Martinmas Fair in Bursley, long ago in the fifties, when everybody throughout the Five Towns pronounced Bursley "Bosley" as a matter of course; in the tedious and tragic old times, before it had been discovered that hell was a myth, and before the invention of pleasure or even of half-holidays.

Others joined them in their patriotic purpose, and on the night of the Wednesday before Martinmas, in the year 1307, each of the three led to the place of meeting ten others, all as resolute and liberty-loving as themselves.

He was a fine fellow, though brusque, and I never saw him without his pipe until two days before we buried him, which was five-and-twenty years ago come Martinmas. "We're all quite weel," Jean said apprehensively as she answered his knock on the manse door, and she tried to be pleasant, too, for well she knew that, if a doctor willed it, she could have fever in five minutes.

When I had that ill turn afore Martinmas, when folk thought I was deein, I began to consider wha would be maist likely to keep a comfortable hame to my ain bairn; and then, I confess, my thoughts turned upon your Jenny.