n might be right,
but still, he thought, he would like to do something for the church mice
before winter came on; they were so very poor.

Whilst he was thinking the matter over he was startled by something
falling between his feet with a hard metallic clatter. It was a bright
new thaler; one of the cathedral jackdaws, who collected such things, had
flown in with it to a stone cornice just above his niche, and the banging
of the sacristy door had startled him into dropping it. Since the
invention of gunpowder the family nerves were not what they had been.

"What have you got there?" asked the Goblin.

"A silver thaler," said the Saint. "Really," he continued, "it is most
fortunate; now I can do something for the church mice."

"How will you manage it?" asked the Goblin.

The Saint considered.

"I will appear in a vision to the vergeress who sweeps the floors. I
will tell her that she will find a silver thaler between my feet, and
that she must take it and buy a measure of corn and put it on my shrine.
When she finds the money she will know that it was a true dream, and she
will take care to follow my directions. Then the mice will have food all
the winter."

"Of course _you_ can do that," observed the Goblin. "Now, _I_ can only
appear to people after they have had a heavy supper of indigestible
things. My opportunities with the vergeress would be limited. There is
some advantage in being a saint after all."

All this while the coin was lying at the Saint's feet. It was clean and
glittering and had the Elector's arms beautifully stamped upon it. The
Saint began to reflect that such an opportunity was too rare to be
hastily disposed of. Perhaps indiscriminate charity might be harmful to
the church mice. After all, it was their function to be poor; the Goblin
had said so, and the Goblin was generally right.

"I've been thinking," he said to that personage, "that perhaps it would
be really better if I ordered a thaler's worth of candles to be placed on
my shrine instead of the corn."

He often wished, for the look of the thing, that people would sometimes
burn candles at his shrine; but as they had forgotten who he was it was
not considered a profitable speculation to pay him that attention.

"Candles would be more orthodox," said the Goblin.

"More orthodox, certainly," agreed the Saint, "and the mice could have
the ends to eat; candle-ends are most fattening."

The Goblin was too well bred to wi