And sheepishly shook his head.
“I hasten’d, as soon as the wedding was done,
And left my wife in the porch;
But i’ faith! she had been wiser than me,—
For she took a bottle to church.”
It is almost unnecessary to observe, that the stones said to originate from serpents petrified at the intercession of St. Keyne or St. Kenna, and supposed by Mr. Tonkin, according to the philosophy of his day, to be Lusus Naturæ, are the shells of extinct Nautili, called Cornua Ammonis, from their resemblance to the horns sculptured on the statues of Jupiter Ammon, found in abundance throughout the neighbourhood of Kainsham, and in most of the formations intermediate between the iron sand and red marle.
Transforming serpents into stone, seems to have been an achievement as appropriate to Saints as was the encountering
of dragons to knights errant. St. Hilda cleared her favourite Island from these venomous reptiles; and St. Patrick, more powerfully gifted, swept them from the whole of Ireland at once.
It was at last observed, with no small degree of wonder, that those metamorphosed snakes invariably wanted a head, and the times of fabricating legends having passed by, this phenomenon never received a solution from the cloister.
St. Brechan, the British Saint and King, the happy father of twenty-six children, all sainted like himself, is represented in the second plate of St. Neot’s Church, in what is called the Young Women’s Window, displaying these twenty-six Saints, small in stature, within a fold of his kingly robe.