he turned to the dying man, and spoke, says Reginald, some such
words as these:--"O spirit! who art diffused in that body in the
likeness of God, and art still inside that breast, I adjure thee by
the Highest, that thou leave not the prison of this thine habitation
while I am overcome by sleep, and know not of it." And so he fell
asleep: but when he woke, the old hermit lay motionless and
breathless. Poor Godric wept, called on the dead man, called on
God; his simple heart was set on seeing this one thing. And,
behold, he was consoled in a wondrous fashion. For about the third
hour of the day the breath returned. Godric hung over him, watching
his lips. Three heavy sighs he drew, then a shudder, another sigh:
{323} and then (so Godric was believed to have said in after years)
he saw the spirit flit.

What it was like, he did not like to say, for the most obvious
reason--that he saw nothing, and was an honest man. A monk teased
him much to impart to him this great discovery, which seemed to the
simple untaught sailor a great spiritual mystery, and which was,
like some other mediaeval mysteries which were miscalled spiritual
(transubstantiation above all), altogether material and gross
imaginations. Godric answered wisely enough, that "no man could
perceive the substance of the spiritual soul."

But the monk insisting, and giving him no rest, he answered,--
whether he wished to answer a fool according to his folly, or
whether he tried to fancy (as men will who are somewhat vain--and if
a saint was not vain, it was no fault of the monks who beset him)
that he had really seen something. He told how it was like a dry,
hot wind rolled into a sphere, and shining like the clearest glass,
but that what it was really like no one could express. Thus much,