stomach. This miracle is as common in the
"Acta Sanctorum" as in the juvenile romances. It served St Nathalan in
such a manner as to preclude the supposition that the saint had invoked
it on the occasion. He locked himself into iron chains, and threw their
key into the river Dee, in order that he might be unable to open the
fetterlock before he had made a pilgrimage to the tombs of St Peter and
St Paul; but the water did its duty, and restored the key in the stomach
of a fish.

We have naturally many fishing anecdotes connected with the northern
saints. Columba is described as out a-fishing one day with a parcel of
his disciples, who are characterised as "strenui piscatores," a term
which would be highly applicable to many a Waltonian of the present day.
The saint, desirous of affording them a pleasant surprise, directs them
to cast their net where a wonderful fish was prepared for them; and they
drag out an "esox" (whatever that may mean) of wonderful size.

Some of the inhabitants of the deep familiar to these saints were
animals of a formidable kind. Columba and a band of his disciples are
going to cross the river Ness, when they meet those who bear on their
shoulders the body of one who, endeavouring to swim across the same
river, had been bitten to death by a monster of the deep. The saint, in
the face of this gloomy procession, requires that one of his disciples
shall swim across the Ness, and bring over a boat which is on the other
side. A disciple named Mocumin, whom the saint had miraculously cured of
a bleeding of the nose, confident in the protecting power of his master,
pulls off all his clothes save his tunica (whatever that may be--coat,
kilt, or leathern shirt), and takes to the water. The monster, who is
reposing deep down in the stillness of the profoundest pool, hears the
stir of the water above, and is seen to rise with a splash on the
surface, and make with distended jaws for the swimmer. The saint, of
course, orders the beast back just at the moment when all seemed over,
and is instantly obeyed. The characteristics of the monster could not be
more closely identical with those of the crocodile or alligator, had the
incident been narrated in Egypt or America.

Adventures with such monsters in our northern waters supply many of the
triumphs attributed to the saints. St Colman of Drumore actually
extracted a young girl alive from the stomach of an "aquetalis bestia."
She had been swallowed while stan