urch
where the bishop lay dying. Then "the same song ascended from the roof
again, and returned heavenward by the way that it came." It was the soul
of his brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to
solace the last hours of Ceadda.

[Sidenote: Cuthbert]

In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has almost been lost
in the glory of Cuthbert. No story better lights up for us the new
religious life of the time than the story of this Apostle of the
Lowlands. Born on the southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert found
shelter at eight years old in a widow's house in the little village of
Wrangholm. Already in youth his robust frame hid a poetic sensibility
which caught even in the chance word of a game a call to higher things,
and a passing attack of lameness deepened the religious impression. A
traveller coming in his white mantle over the hillside and stopping his
horse to tend Cuthbert's injured knee seemed to him an angel. The boy's
shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still famous as a
sheepwalk, though a scant herbage scarce veils the whinstone rock. There
meteors plunging into the night became to him a company of angelic
spirits carrying the soul of Bishop Aidan heavenward, and his longings
slowly settled into a resolute will towards a religious life. In 651 he
made his way to a group of straw-thatched log-huts, in the midst of an
untilled solitude, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled
in the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land is a land of poetry
and romance. Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and
Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy.
Agriculture has chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage
and steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow. But to
see the Lowlands as they were in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow and
farm away again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted here and
there with clusters of wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over
which travellers rode spear in hand and eye kept cautiously about them.
The Northumbrian peasantry among whom he journeyed were for the most part
Christians only in name. With Teutonic indifference they yielded to their
thegns in nominally accepting the new Christianity as these had yielded
to the king. But they retained their old superstitions side by side with
the new worship; plague or mishap drove them back to a reliance on t