• . 5 . SAINT'S CATTLE .,[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—The prominence given to the lives of the Saints in your colturms, and the reference by Auspek " to the "merriment of the saints" and St. Peter's approval of the Fiddler of Dooney as recorded by Mr. Yeats, prompts me to send you the delightful example of playful banter in a correspondence be- tween .St. Modus and St. Columba, taken from Irish Texts, 1(cating, Vol. 4, page 71:
" Mochua and Columeille Were contemporaries, and when Moeltua or MaeDuaoh was a hermit in the desert the only cattle-he had in the world were is cock and a mouse- and ally. • The cock's Service to him was to keep the Main time of midnight, and the mouse would let - him sleep only five hours in the day-and-night, awl when he desired to sleep longer, through being tired from making many crosses and genuflexions, the mouse would come and rub his ear, and thus waken him ; and the service the fly did him was to keep walking on every line of the Psalter that he read, and when ho mated from reciting his psalms the fly rested on the line he left off at till he resumed the reciting of his psalms. Soon after that these three precious ones died and Mochua, after that event, wrate a later to Columcille, who was in Iona in Alba, and he complained of the death of his flock. Columeille wrote to him, and said thus '0, brother,' said ho, 'thou must not be anti-Wised at the death of the flock that thou host lost, for misfortune exists only where there is wealth.'"
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