his altar, or to forgive the lad who had robbed the nest which his
sacred raven had built upon the roof, and, falling with the decayed
timber, had broken his bones, and maimed his sacrilegious hand.

Originally, says Bede, a monk at Melrose, and afterward abbot of the
same place, he used to wander weeks together out of his monastery,
seemingly into Ettrick and the Lammermuirs, and preach in such
villages as "being seated high up among craggy, uncouth mountains,
were frightful to others even to look at, and whose poverty and
barbarity rendered them inaccessible to other teachers." "So
skilful an orator was he, so fond of enforcing his subject, and such
a brightness appeared in his angelic face, that no man presumed to
conceal from him the most hidden secrets of their hearts, but all
openly confessed what they had done."

So he laboured for many years, till his old abbot Eata, who had
become bishop and abbot at Lindisfarne, sent for him thither, and
made him prior of the monks for several years. But at last he
longed, like so many before him, for solitude. He considered (so he
said afterwards to the brethren) that the life of the disciplined
and obedient monk was higher than that of the lonely and independent
hermit: but yet he longed to be alone; longed, it may be, to recall
at least upon some sea-girt rock thoughts which had come to him in
those long wanderings on the heather moors, with no sound to
distract him save the hum of the bee and the wail of the curlew; and
so he went away to that same rock of Farne, where Aidan had taken
refuge some ten or fifteen years before, and there, with the deep
sea rolling at his feet and the gulls wailing about his head, he
built himself one of those "Picts' Houses," the walls of which
remain still in many parts of Scotland--a circular hut of turf and