Was he less powerful
or less careful of his own honor than St. Lieven of Holthem, who, not more
than fifty years before, had struck stone-blind four soldiers of the
Emperor Henry's, who had dared, after warning, to plunder the altar?
[Footnote: Ibid.] Let them remember, too, the fate of their own
forefathers, the heathens of the North, and the check which, one hundred
and seventy years before, they had received under those very walls. They
had exterminated the people of Walcheren; they had taken prisoner Count
Regnier; they had burnt Ghent, Bruges, and St. Omer itself, close by;
they had left naught between the Scheldt and the Somme, save stark corpses
and blackened ruins. What could withstand them till they dared to lift
audacious hands against the heavenly lord who sleeps there in Sithiu? Then
they poured down in vain over the Heilig-Veld, innumerable as the locusts.
Poor monks, strong in the protection of the holy Bertin, sallied out and
smote them hip and thigh, singing their psalms the while. The ditches of
the fortress were filled with unbaptized corpses; the piles of vine-twigs
which they lighted to burn down the gates turned their flames into the
Norsemen's faces at the bidding of St. Bertin; and they fled from that
temporal fire to descend into that which is eternal, while the gates of
the pit were too narrow for the multitude of their miscreant souls.
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