st and south and west, but on the north the Forest lay dense
and dark and perilous. For in those ancient days wolves still prowled
about the wattled folds of the little settlement of Wolverhampton, and
Birmingham was only the rude homestead of the Beormingas, a cluster of
beehive huts fenced round with a stockade in the depths of the woods.

Among the swineherds of the King there was one named Eoves, and one
day, while wandering through the glades of great oaks on this edge of
the Forest, he saw three beautiful women who came towards him singing a
song more strange and sweet than he had ever heard. He told his
fellows, and the story spread far and wide. Some said that the three
beautiful women were three goddesses of the old pagan world, and
thought Eoves had acted very foolishly in not speaking to them. Others
said they might have been the Three Fates, in whose hands are the lives
of men, and the joy of their lives, and the sorrow they must endure,
and the death which is the end of their days; and they thought that
perhaps Eoves had been wise to keep silence.

But when the holy Bishop Egwin heard the tale, he visited the place
alone, and in the first glimmer of the sunrise, when all wild creatures
are tame and the earth is most lovely to look upon, he beheld the three
beautiful women, and he saw in a moment that they were the Virgin
Mother Mary and two heavenly handmaidens. "And our Lady," he used
afterwards to say, "was more white-shining than lilies and more freshly
sprung than roses, and the savage forest was filled with the fragrance
of Paradise."

Straightway the Bishop sent his woodmen and had the aged oaks felled
and the underwood cleared away; and on the spot where the beautiful
women had stood a fair church was built for the worship of the true
God, and around it clustered the cells of an abbey of Black Monks. In
a little while people no longer spoke of the place by its old name, but
called it Eovesholme, because of the vision of Eoves.

Now when more than three and a half centuries had gone by, and Agelwyn
the Great-hearted was Abbot, there was a Saxon noble, young and
dissolute, who had been stricken by the Yellow Plague, and, after three
days' sickness, had been abandoned by his friends and followers in what
seemed to be his last agony. For the Yellow Plague was a sickness so
ghastly and dreadful that men called it the Yellow Death, and fled from
it as swiftly as they might. But in the dead and d