the defenders meanwhile showering down keen-pointed arrows on them from above.  Both parties, under the chieftains’ guidance, fought fiercely, in a fever of excitement, giving no heed to wounds, seeing nothing but the foe and the battlements to be scaled.  Then either a successful sortie broke the ranks of the assailants and sent them back to their forest camp in wild disorder, or, the stockade giving way, the stormers swept in like a wave of the sea, and all was chaos and wild struggle hand to hand.  Whatever the outcome, both sides thought of the wild surge of will and valor in that hour as the crowning event of their lives.

Meanwhile, within the quiet enclosures of the monasteries and religious schools, the spirit of the time was working with not less fervor, to invisible and ideal ends.  At Bangor, on the neck of the northern Ards; at Moville, where Lough Foyle spreads its inland sea; at Saul, where the first Messenger won his first convert; at Devenish Island amid the waters of Lough Erne; at Monasterboice in the plain of Louth; at Grlendalough, among the solemn hills of Wicklow; at Kildare, beneath the oak-woods; at Durrow, amid the central marshes, and many another ancient seat of learning, the way of wisdom and holiness was trod with gladness.  Latin had been taught since the early days of the Message; the native tongue of Ireland, consecrated in the hymns of St. Patrick and the poems of St. Colum of the Churches, was the language in which all pupils were taught, the modern ministrant to the classical speech of Rome.  Nor were the Scriptures alone studied.  Terence, Virgil, Ovid, the Augustans and the men of the silver age, were familiar in the Irish schools; and to these Latin writers were soon added the Greeks, more especially—­as was natural—­the Greek Fathers, the religious philosophers, and those who embodied the thought and controversies of the early Christian centuries.  To Greek, Hebrew was added, so that both Old and New Testaments were known in their proper tongues.  About the time when “Ragallac son of Uatac was pierced on the back of a white steed,” Saint Camin in his island school at Inis Caltra, where red mountains hem in Lough Derg of the Shannon, was writing his Commentary on the Psalms, recording the Hebrew readings on the margin of the page.  A few years before that battle, in 634, Saint Cummian of Durrow, some thirty miles to the east of Camin’s Holy Island, wrote to his brother, the Abbot of Iona in the northern seas, quoting Latin writers sacred and secular, as well as Origen, Cyril and Pachomius among the Greeks.  The learned man discusses the astronomical systems of the Mediterranean world, giving the names of months and cycles in Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, and telling of his researches into the true time of Easter, while on a journey to Italy and Rome.  This letter, which has come down to our days, is first-hand testimony to the learning of the early Irish schools.

[Illustration:  Ancient Cross, Glendalough.]