Saving for later.
Saving for later. Originally shared by Dirk Puehl “They told, how in their convent-cell / A Saxon princess once did dwell, / The lovely Edelfled. / And how, of thousand snakes, each one / Was changed into a coil of stone, /When holy Hilda pray'd; / Themselves, within their holy bound, / Their stony folds had often found. / They told, how sea /fowls' pinions fail, / As over Whitby's towers they sail, / And, sinking down, with flutterings faint, / They do their homage to the saint. (Sir Walter Scott “Marmion”) Being able to petrify snakes is generally a useful skill to have, especially when you live in a place where you might find a deadly poisonous reptile in every crack. The north of England is usually not rated tops among the regions with an abundant serpentine population, but in the early days of Christianity it must have been all the rage for a saint to have a proven track record of driving out the brutes, with St Patrick leading the way in Ireland, of course. When a hor...