254 



POPULAR BELIEFS. 



watch over St. Patrick's gap showed the doorway of it to the pilgrims who 

 were attracted to Ireland by motives of piety or curiosity, but the aperture 

 remained impenetrably closed. Notwithstanding, and though no one ventured 

 to renew the experiment made by the Chevalier Owen, every nation took 

 care that it was represented in the stories told of visits to the purgatory of 

 St. Patrick, so firmly rooted was the belief in it throughout Europe. 



A not less famous superstition, Avhich dates from the same period, and 

 which seems to have been brought from the East after the first Crusades, 

 is that of the Wandering Jew, as the inhabitants of the country dubbed 

 every beggar with a long white beard who trudged along the roads with 

 eyes downcast, and without opening his lips. The story of this accursed 



Fig. 185. Owen, accompanied by Monka chanting the Litanies for the Dead, repairs to the 

 Aperture of the Gap, and creeps into it. Miniature of a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century 

 (No. 1,588). In the National Library, Paris. 



pilgrim was told for the first time to the monks of St. Albans in 1228 by 

 an Armenian archbishop who had arrived from the Holy Land. Joseph 

 Cartaphilus was doorkeeper at the practorium of Pontius Pilate when Jesus 

 was led away by the Jews to be crucified. As Jesus halted upon the threshold 

 of the pratorium, Cartaphilus struck him in the loins and said, " Move faster ; 

 why do you stop here?" Jesus, turning round to him, said with a severe 

 look, " I go, and you will await my coming." Cartaphilus, who was then 

 thirty years old, and who since then always returned to that age when he 

 had completed a hundred years, was always awaiting the coming of the 

 Lord and the end of the world. He was supposed to be a man of great 

 piety, of few words, often weeping, never smiling, and being content with 



