They seem to have been a turbulent race of people at Fowey, for they once actually became dissatisfied with their patron saint, the Irish St. Finbar, and when they rebuilt their church in 1336 they dismissed him and adopted St. Nicholas to guide their future destinies.  Perhaps it was because St. Nicholas was the patron saint of all sailors, as he allayed a great storm when on a voyage to the Holy Land.  What is now named Drake’s Island, off Plymouth, was formerly named St. Nicholas.  It would not be difficult to find many other churches dedicated to St. Nicholas on the sea-coast from there to the north, and we remembered he was the patron saint at Aberdeen.

St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of the Russians, some of the Czars of that mighty Empire having been named after him.  While St. Catherine is the patron saint of the girls, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of the boys, and strange to relate is also the patron saint of parish clerks, who were formerly called “scholars.”

When pictured in Christian art this saint is dressed in the robe of a bishop, with three purses, or three golden balls, or three children.  The three purses represent those given by him to three sisters to enable them to marry; but we did not know the meaning of the three golden balls, unless it was that they represented the money the purses contained.  My brother suggested they might have some connection with the three golden balls hanging outside the pawnbrokers’ shops.  Afterwards we found St. Nicholas was the patron saint of that body.  But the three children were all boys, who once lived in the East, and being sent to a school at Athens, were told to call on St. Nicholas on their way for his benediction.  They stopped for the night at a place called Myra, where the innkeeper murdered them for their money and baggage, and placed their mangled bodies in a pickling-tub, intending to sell them as pork.  St. Nicholas, however, saw the tragedy in a vision, and went to the inn, where the man confessed the crime, whilst St. Nicholas, by a miracle, raised the murdered boys to life again!

Sometimes he had been nicknamed “Nick,” or “Old Nick,” and then he became a demon, or the Devil, or the “Evil spirit of the North.”  In Scandinavia he was always associated with water either in sea or lake, river or waterfall, his picture being changed to that of a horrid-looking creature, half-child and half-horse, the horse’s feet being shown the wrong way about.  Sometimes, again, he was shown as an old black man like an imp, sitting on a rock and wringing the dripping water from his long black hair!