CHAPTER CXCI.
The Number of the Years of his Life.
On the seventeenth day of March, in the one hundredth and twentieth and third year of his age, departed he forth of this world; and thus the years of his life are reckoned. Ere he was carried into Hibernia by the pirates, he had attained his sixteenth year; oppressed beneath a most cruel servitude, six years did he feed swine; four years did he feed with the sweet food of the Gospel those who before were swine, but who, casting away the filth of their idolatry, became his flock of unspotted lambs; eighteen years did he study under Saint Germanus, the Bishop of Auxerres. When he had reached his fiftieth and third year, he was invested with the episcopal dignity, and returned unto Hibernia, therein to preach; in the space of thirty and five years converted he unto Christ all that country and many other islands; and during the thirty and three years which remained unto him, leading a life of contemplation, abided he chiefly in Saballum, or in the monastery which he had founded in Ardmachia. Nor did he willingly leave those holy places, unless some cause of inevitable urgency called him forth; nevertheless, once in every year did he celebrate a council, that he might bring back unto the right rule those things which he knew to need reformation.
CHAPTER CXCII.
The Funeral Honors which Men and Angels paid
unto the Body of the Saint.
And as Saint Patrick expired, the surrounding circle of monks commended his spirit unto God, and enwrapped his body in the linen cloth which Saint Brigida had prepared. And the multitude of the people and of the clergy gathered together, and mourned with tears and with sighs the dissolution of Patrick, their patron, even as the desolation of their country, and paid in psalms and in hymns the rites which unto his funeral were due. But on the following night a light-streaming choir of angels kept their heavenly watch, and waked around the body; and illumining the place and all therein with their radiance, delighting with their odor, charming with the modulation of their soft-flowing psalmody, poured they all around their spiritual sweetness. Then came the sleep of the Lord on all who had thither collected, and while the angelic rites were performed, held them in their slumber even until the morning. And when the morning came, the company of angels reascended into heaven, leaving behind them the sweet odor which excelled all perfumes; the which, when the sleepers awakened, they and all who came unto the place experienced even for twelve succeeding days. For during that time was the sanctified body preserved unsepultured, inasmuch as the controversies of the people with the clergy permitted it not to be buried in that holy place.