ving. Then he was taken up into heaven.

Years after, two men spent the night in the inn, and one murdered the
other and hid the body under the straw, where it was afterwards found by
other travellers, and the innkeeper accused of the murder. He was
condemned and was on the scaffold when a beautiful youth came riding in
hot haste, crying: "Pardon!" The youth led the people into the church,
before the coffin of the murdered man, and cried: "Rise, dead one, and
speak with the living, and tell us who murdered you." The dead man
replied: "The innkeeper is innocent; my treacherous companion killed
me." Then the youth accompanied the innkeeper home, revealed himself as
St. Oniria, blessed them, and disappeared.[15]

Another legend (No. 92), "The Story of the Hermit," has as its subject
the mystery of God's Providence, and is familiar to English readers in
the form of Parnell's Hermit. The substance of the Sicilian version is
as follows: A hermit sees a man wrongfully accused of theft and
shockingly maltreated. He thereupon concludes that God is unjust to
suffer such things, and determines to return to the world. On his way
back a handsome youth meets him and they journey together. A muleteer
allows them to ride his beasts, and in return the youth abstracts the
muleteer's money from his wallet and drops it in the road. A woman who
keeps an inn receives them hospitably, and on leaving the next morning,
the youth strangles her child in the cradle. All at once the youth
becomes a shining angel, and says to the hermit: "Listen to me, O man
who has been bold enough to murmur against God's decrees;" and then
explains that the person who had been wrongfully accused of theft had
years before murdered his father on that very spot; the muleteer's money
was stolen money, and the child of the hostess, had it lived, would have
become a robber and murderer. Then the angel says: "Now you see that
God's justice is more far-sighted than man's. Return, then, to your
hermitage, and repent if so be that your murmuring be forgiven you." The
angel disappears and the hermit returns to his mountain, does severer
penance, and dies a saint.[16]

The legend in Gonzenbach (No. 91) entitled "Joseph the Just" is nothing
but the story of Joseph and his Brethren, taken from the Bible. In the
Sicilian version Joseph has only three brothers; otherwise the story
follows the account in Genesis very closely. Another legend in the same
collection (No. 89), "The