The Life of Saint Columba, Apostle of Scotland

								

out, he bade her admire its beauty. Eithne was a daughter of kings, but
never before had she seen so marvellously fair a web; she stretched out
her hands to grasp it, but even as she touched it, it rose and
fluttered lightly into the air. Over hill, mountain, and lough floated
its shadowy loveliness, till it rested at last on the moors and
mountains of a land that lay far away in the moaning seas. Then Eithne
wept for the loss of the beautiful veil, but the angel comforted her.
"It is but a symbol," he said, "of the son that shall be born to thee
in the days to come. He shall be a prince and a prophet; the world
shall be perfumed by his holiness; and he shall bear the flower of the
faith among the heathen far over land and sea."
When morning came Eithne told her husband of the dream, and the two
took counsel together. That his son should be a great prince in no way
surprised Fedhlimidh. Was not he himself a grandson of the great king
Niall of the Nine Hostages, so called because he had subdued nine Kings
of Ireland to his will and made them his vassals, and was not the
reigning king of all Ireland his near kinsman? No strange thing would
it have been in those turbulent days, when the lives of kings were
short and uncertain, were the son of Fedhlimidh himself to be set on
the throne as High King of Ireland.
But Eithne's dream seemed to point more to a heavenly supremacy than an
earthly; was it an indication of God's will that they should dedicate
their child to Him? They thought it was, and a few months later, when
heaven sent them a fair and beautiful little son, they earnestly prayed
to the Giver of all good gifts that He would take the child, if it
seemed well to Him, for His service.
At Teampall-Douglas, a few miles from Gartan, there lived a holy old
priest called Cruithnechan; to him they took the babe that it might
receive at his hands the holy rites of Baptism. He was given the name
of Columba, a not uncommon name in Ireland at the time, and while yet a
little child was sent back to the saintly Cruithnechan that the old man
might train him in the ways of wisdom and holiness.
In this Columba's parents but followed the custom of the time, for it
was usual for the sons of chiefs to be brought up from their earliest
youth by some great bard, soldier, or priest, according to their
destination in life; and it was the duty of these foster parents to
train their charges in all that had to do with their future profession.
The little Columba was an apt pupil. It was his delight to accompany
his master to the Church, there to listen to the chanting of the Divine
Office; and so keen of ear and quick of memory was the boy that he had
learnt some of the psalms by heart before he could spell them out in
the Psalter--the lesson-book of every young reader of his time.
Cruithnechan himself was unaware of this until one day when he took the
child with him on a visit to a brother priest near Derry. The two