,
ploughing up their farm, drawing to them more and more heathen converts,
more and more heathen school-children; and St. Boniface came to see them
from time to time, whenever he could get a holiday, and spent happy days
in prayer and study, with his pupil and friend. And ten years after,
when St. Boniface was martyred at last by the Friesland heathens, and
died, as he had lived, like an apostle of God, then all the folk of
Maintz wanted to bring his corpse home to their town, because he had been
Archbishop there. But he 'appeared in a dream to a certain deacon, and
said: "Why delay ye to take me home to Fulda, to my rest in the
wilderness which God bath prepared for me?"'

So St. Boniface sleeps at Fulda,--unless the French Republican armies dug
up his bones, and scattered them, as they scattered holier things, to the
winds of heaven. And all men came to worship at his tomb, after the
fashion of those days. And Fulda became a noble abbey, with its
dom-church, library, schools, workshops, farmsteads, almshouses, and all
the appanages of such a place, in the days when monks were monks indeed.
And Sturmi became a great man, and went through many troubles and
slanders, and conquered in them all, because there was no fault found in
him, as in Daniel of old; and died in a good old age, bewept by
thousands, who, but for him, would have been heathens still. And the
Aihen-loh became rich corn-land and garden, and Fulda an abbey borough
and a principality, where men lived in peace under mild rule, while the
feudal princes quarrelled and fought outside; and a great literary
centre, whose old records are now precious to the diggers among the bones
of bygone times; and at last St. Sturmi and the Aihen-lob had so
developed themselves, that the latest record of the Abbots of Fulda which
I have seen is this, bearing date about 1710:--

'The arms of the most illustrious Lord and Prince, Abbot of Fulda,
Archchancellor of the most Serene Empress, Primate of all Germany and
Gaul, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.' Developed, certainly: and
not altogether in the right direction. For instead of the small beer,
which they had promised St. Boniface to drink to the end of the world,
the abbots of Fulda had the best wine in Germany, and the best table too.
Be that as it may, to have cleared the timber off the Aihen-lob, and
planted a Christian colony instead, was enough to make St. Sturmi hope
that he had not read his Bible altogethe