At last the latter realized that he must watch and discover what happened. This he did, and after a little time one evening the dragon emerged from his cave, lashing the ground with his tail in his fury, and filling the air with the sulphurous smoke and flame which he breathed out. Great as was his strength, Haimon at once realized that he could not overcome so terrible an enemy easily; so commending his soul to God he waited with a brave heart. Soon dawn began to break over the mountains, and at the first glimpse of light the dragon turned and fled back to his lair. Haimon, taking courage at the sight, set off in pursuit, and by-and-by they both arrived at the cave in which the dragon was accustomed to hide during the day. The entrance was so narrow that when the monster had got partly in it was impossible for him to turn, and so Haimon, seeing his opportunity, raised his sword, and calling on God to strengthen him, cut off the dragon's head with a single blow. Then he cut out the tongue or sting of the monster as a trophy, and eventually hung it up in the sanctuary of the church. Nowadays one is shown at Wilten a representation of this dragon's tongue, which we are told was above two feet in length.
The dragon once dead the building progressed rapidly, and when it was finished Haimon, no doubt in an ebullition of joy, seized a huge rock, which he had quarried, but did not need to use for the foundations, and threw it with all his might into the valley. It was a good throw, for the rock, after nearly two miles of flight, struck against the hill of Ambras and fell into the valley, where it may yet be seen! Haimon endowed the Abbey with all the land which stretched between its site and the stone at the foot of the hill of Ambras.
Now it only remained to colonize the monastery, and ultimately the Benedictines came to inhabit it, and here the giant lived amongst them a life of penance and good works, dying in the year 878. His body, so tradition states, was buried on the right-hand side of the high altar in the church. But although many searches have been made for his remains during the period which elapsed between his death and the middle of the seventeenth century, they have never been discovered. But the last search in 1644 was disastrous as well as unsuccessful, because it undermined a great part of the wall of the church, which collapsed. The popular belief in the two giants is kept alive by the huge wooden statues representing them, which are placed at the entrance of the church. The interior of the building is in the form of a basilica, and contains not only frescoes by Caspar Waldmann, but also some good pictures by Grasmayr, Busjäger, Andersag, Egid Schor, and other artists.
The Abbey of Wilten in those days was one of the three most important in Tyrol, and was not only the centre of religious, but also of the artistic life of the country, and it nowadays possesses some very interesting and valuable pictures.
One of the most famous of the old-time inmates of the Abbey was Petermann, once a lover of the licentious Margaret of Tyrol, yclept "Pocket-Mouthed Meg." After her abdication in 1367, Petermann entered the monastery to expiate the sins and follies of his youth. He endowed the Abbey with an estate, but he showed his business capacity by having an agreement drawn up with the Abbot setting forth the terms upon which he joined the brotherhood. Amongst other things he was, firstly, to derive benefit from all the masses said by the monks, and the good works performed by them; secondly, was to have two servants to wait upon him, who were to share the meals of the brethren; thirdly, he, himself, was to have food similar to that served to the Abbot and wines from the monastic cellar. Apparently the arrangement did not, after all, fit in with the views of Petermann, for we find he afterwards insisted upon an increase in his food allowance to the extent of a capon, four fowls, forty eggs, and four pounds of butter, with sufficient hay for the feeding of his three horses.
A PINE WOOD NEAR INNSBRUCK
A LEGEND OF WILTEN
The other church at Wilten (the Parish Church), which stands on the opposite side of Leopold-Strasse, dates only from the latter part of the eighteenth century, and was built as a secular church in conformity with the decree of the Emperor Joseph II., by Franz Penz of Telfs, in the Rococo style of architecture. On the high altar of the church is a very ancient and quaint Madonna known as "Mutter Gottes unter den vier Saülen" carved in sandstone, the legend relating to which is as follows: The "Thundering Legion" of Marcus Aurelius, when stationed at Veldidena about the year 137, brought this image with them, which they are stated to have worshipped, and on one occasion, when departing for an expedition to a distant part of the country, they buried it under four trees, and as they did not return had no opportunity of resurrecting it. There it lay for many years, until one, Rathold Von Aiblingen, after making a pilgrimage to Rome, where he heard the story of its burying and the place of its concealment, dug it up and set it upon the altar in a baldachino, which was supported by four pillars, where it has always been an object of much veneration. Amongst its many famous devotees was Frederick of the Empty Purse, who, during his wanderings through Tyrol with his trusty Hans Von Müllinen, when under the ban of the church, came and knelt before the shrine and prayed for a blessing. Afterwards, when he had regained his possessions, he attributed his success to the intervention of the Madonna at Wilten and caused a picture to be painted of himself and his esquire, in which they are shown kneeling at the shrine under the protective mantle of the Virgin. This quaint picture is now hung in the church amongst many other curious and often pathetic votive offerings.