Gall and the Bear Who Brought the Firewood

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Full script

There is a bear in the doorway, and it is looking at the bread.

It is a large bear, and it has arrived in the way that large animals arrive, which is without any noise at all. One moment the clearing beside the stream is full of birdsong and firelight, and the next there is a brown shoulder in the gap between two fir trees, and then a head, and then an expression. The expression is the one that you see on a very big dog under a very small table. It says: I have no plans. I would just like to know what is on that plate.

The man at the fire does not move. He is thin, and pale from his fever, and wrapped in a blanket that has been mended so many times it is mostly mending. In his hand is half a loaf. He looks at the bear. The bear looks at the loaf. The stream goes on talking to itself in the dark.

And the man, very quietly, in the language of the country he has only lately come to, says the most unlikely thing that anyone has ever said to a bear.

He says: "Would you mind bringing some more wood?"

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about Saint Gall, an Irish monk who lived about fourteen hundred years ago, and who is honoured by Catholics, and remembered by the Orthodox who keep the saints of the first thousand years. The bear comes from the old lives of Gall, which were written down a good while after his death, and we will tell you plainly where the record is solid and where it is the old story speaking. A few of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us start with the weather, because in this story the weather is practically a character.

The year is a little after six hundred and ten. The place is the country just south and east of Lake Constance, the big lake where what is now Germany and Austria and Switzerland all come down to the water and look at each other. If you have never been there, picture a very large, very clean, very cold lake, with mountains standing around the far end of it like a row of tall, polite guests who have not been told when to leave. Behind the lake are hills. On the hills are forests. In those days the forests were not the tidy, signposted sort with a car park and a place to buy ice cream. They went on and on, and the paths through them were mostly made by animals who had their own opinions about where paths should go.

There were people living there. This part is worth remembering, because stories about hermits in forests can make it sound as if the whole country were empty. It was not. There were farming families in the valleys and fishermen on the shore, and in the little forts along the lakeside there were the descendants of old Roman soldiers and the newer people the Romans used to call the Alemanni, who had come to stay and had made themselves quite at home. Most of them were not Christians yet, or only half so. They kept their own old customs and their own old gods, and they were, from everything the old lives tell us, neither better nor worse than people anywhere. They were people who worried about the harvest, and about their children's coughs, and about whether the river would flood.

Into this country, in the autumn of that year or thereabouts, came a small party of Irish monks, wet through, and rather the worse for travel, and arguing cheerfully about directions.

Now, we have to take a moment to explain the Irish, because without them none of this makes sense.

In the sixth century, Ireland was a very particular place. It had been Christian for about a hundred and fifty years, since the time of Saint Patrick, who we have met before on this programme, and it had taken to the faith in a way that nobody had quite expected. The Irish had no big Roman cities. They had no bishops with enormous palaces. What they had instead were monasteries, hundreds of them, set down in valleys and on islands and at the ends of impossible roads, and these monasteries were the centre of everything. They were schools, and farms, and libraries, and guest houses, and very often the nearest thing to a village. A young Irishman who wanted to learn to read and write went to a monastery. A young Irishman who wanted to pray went to a monastery. A young Irishman who wanted to spend four years standing in a cold river reciting the psalms, which was apparently a thing some of them did, also went to a monastery.

And the Irish monks had a peculiar and rather wonderful idea about holiness. They called it, in their own language, a kind of exile for Christ. The idea was that the most generous thing a person could do was to leave home. Not because home was bad. Because home was the thing you loved best, and so giving it up for God was the best gift you had. So they would set out in little boats made of ox hide, with no oars to speak of, and let the wind and the Lord take them where they pleased. Some of them found Iceland. Some of them found the Hebrides. One of them, if the stories are right, sailed around the Atlantic for seven years looking for a paradise island, and we have told that story already, and I still say the whales were the best part.

And some of them, instead of sailing, simply walked. They walked out of Ireland, across Britain, across the sea to the land of the Franks, and onward. They were the ancient equivalent of backpackers, with the difference that they carried books, and the books were the point.

The most famous of these walkers was a man named Columbanus.

Columbanus came from the west of Ireland, and he was, by every account, a remarkable person. He was brilliant. He was passionate. He was tall, I think we are meant to imagine, and fierce about the things he was fierce about, and he wrote Latin better than most of the educated people of Gaul, which they did not always enjoy. He had spent years at a great monastery in the north of Ireland, in a place called Bangor, and then, when he was in his forties, he felt a call to leave. So he gathered twelve companions, which is a number with a good Gospel ring to it, and set out for the continent.

One of the twelve was a young man named Gall.

We do not know a great deal about Gall's early life, and the old lives do not pretend to, which I find rather honest of them. We are told that he was born in Ireland, that he was well educated, that he studied under Columbanus at Bangor and loved him, and that he was gifted with languages. That last point is going to matter. For now, let us just say that Gall was a young man who was good at listening, good at learning, not quite as loud as his teacher, and that when Columbanus said, "We are going," Gall said, "Yes," and went.

The twelve crossed the sea and landed in the kingdom of the Franks. And here we have to be careful, because the old lives are full of stories about what they did next, and many of them are about quarrels with kings, and queens, and bishops, and are told in a way that is not very bedtime. So here is the short version.

Columbanus and his monks were welcomed at first. The king of that part of the world gave them an old ruined Roman fort in the hills of Burgundy, a place called Luxeuil, where the springs ran warm, and they built a monastery. It grew very fast. Young Frankish nobles came to join, and the Irish rule, which was strict, and rather wonderful in places, and rather alarming in others, was kept by hundreds of monks. They sang the psalms day and night in relays, so that the praying never stopped. They worked in the fields. They copied manuscripts. They ate what they were given, which was not much, and they were apparently very happy.

But Columbanus was not a man who made things easy for people in power. He told the royal family, in plain words, that the way they were living was not the way a Christian king should live. He did this to their faces. He did it more than once. And eventually, as you might expect, the royal family stopped finding it charming, and in the year six hundred and ten they sent soldiers to put Columbanus and his Irish companions on a boat and send them home.

The boat, according to the old story, ran into trouble almost at once, and the Irish found themselves stranded on the coast, having been, in a manner of speaking, thrown out and then not quite thrown out. They turned east. They went up the Rhine. They went up through the country of the Alemanni, to a little place on a lake where the Romans had once had a town, and there they stopped and looked about them and decided to stay for a while.

It is at this point that Gall's gift comes in. Because the people of the lake did not speak Latin, or Irish, or the language of the Franks. They spoke their own language, an early form of German. And Gall, alone among the monks, was able to learn it. We are told he spoke it well enough to preach in it, and to be understood, and to be liked.

So here are two Irishmen, side by side in a boat, in the autumn mist, at the edge of a new country. One of them, Columbanus, is a great voice, and a great mind, and a great hot-tempered saint, and he would be the first to tell you he is in charge. The other, Gall, is quietly learning how to say "good morning" to fishermen.

The old lives tell us the monks tried their hand at preaching in a nearby town, and that Gall did the talking, because Gall was the one the people could follow. Columbanus stood beside him and, I imagine, nodded gravely. And if the old story is right, the first sermons Gall preached were not especially fiery. They were about how God made the lake, and the fish, and the hills, and how God was fond of all of it, and of the people who lived there, and of the people who fished for a living most of all, since a good many of the first friends of the Lord had been fishermen too.

There is a story, and I think we should say it is the old story speaking, that Gall was very good at fishing himself. He had a way with nets. The local fishermen noticed, as fishermen always do, and some of them decided that a man who could do that and who also spoke their language and also told them God loved them was probably worth listening to. And so the church in that little place began to grow.

Now, I want to tell you about the thing that went wrong, because it is a little sad, and because it is the reason that Gall ended up in the forest at all.

Columbanus, after about three years by the lake, decided it was time to move on. The local people, or some of them, were not as friendly as the first ones. The politics of the neighbouring kingdoms were shifting. And Columbanus, who was never one to sit still, heard of a new kingdom in Italy where a king was willing to give him land for a monastery, and he decided to go.

Gall, however, did not want to go.

Or rather, and this is the important part, Gall could not go. He had fallen ill. The old lives say it was a fever, and by the sound of it, a bad one, the kind that comes on in the damp of autumn and leaves a person weak as a kitten for weeks. Gall was in no state to cross the Alps in winter. He was in no state to cross the street.

And so, in the old story, Gall went to Columbanus and said, as gently as he could: "Father, I am not well enough to come. I think I had better stay here."

And Columbanus, who was fierce, and tired, and who loved Gall as a son, and who was a little afraid that the young man was making an excuse, said something that was not very kind. The old lives record it with a bit of a wince. He said, more or less: "If you will not come, then as long as I am alive, you are not to say Mass."

This was a hard thing to say. For a priest, saying Mass is the centre of the day. To be forbidden is like being told you may not eat at your own table. The old life is not entirely sure whether Columbanus meant it as a punishment, or a test, or just the sort of thing that is said in a sad, rushed moment when a long friendship is being pulled apart at the seams. But it was said. And Gall, being the sort of man he was, did not argue.

He bowed. He said, "Father, I will do as you say." And he stayed.

The monks went off to the south, with their books, and their staffs, and their big loud leader, and Gall was left on the shore of the lake with a single companion, a deacon named Hiltibod, and a very high temperature.

I think it is worth stopping, here, in the story, and noticing what a gentle man Gall must have been. He was ill, and alone, and told off by the person he loved best, and left behind. And as far as the old lives show, he did not complain once. He did not sulk. He did not go and write a long letter to somebody about how unfair it all was. He did what he was asked. And then he did the next thing, which was to get better.

Gall got better slowly, in the way that a person does when they are being looked after by a friend who is rather good at it. Hiltibod, the deacon, was a local man, and he knew the country, and the old lives say he was the one who knew where to find a good place to live.

"It should be somewhere with water," Hiltibod said, "and somewhere sheltered, and somewhere not too near anyone who would be offended by us."

"Is that a long list?" said Gall.

"It is a list," said Hiltibod, "that describes about one place."

And so, when the fever had gone, and the weather had cooled, the two of them set off into the forest. They walked for a day. They walked through beech and fir and a lot of low, wet ferns. They crossed a stream, and then crossed it back, because they had misread it the first time. And in the early evening, when the light was going the colour of weak tea, they came to a small valley with a river in it, a river that tumbled down over rocks in a series of small, cheerful waterfalls, and made a noise like someone telling a very long joke in the next room.

They stood at the top of the valley and looked down.

"Well," said Gall, "this is a good place."

"It is," said Hiltibod.

"I think," said Gall, "I should like to stay here."

And then, because he was a man who tended to pray at the beginning of things, he stopped, and looked about him, and found a bramble bush that was growing across the path, and he fell to his knees right in the middle of it.

I would like to be honest and say that the old lives do not report this as a deliberate choice. It was probably an accident. But the old lives do say that, when Gall got up, the thorns had caught his foot, and he took this as a sign. "This," he said, "is where the Lord wants me to rest. I shall build here." And Hiltibod, who had been looking at the brambles with a good deal of alarm, said, "Right. I shall bring the axe."

That is how a great monastery begins, I think. Not with a plan, but with a thorn.

They set to work. They cut branches, and tied them, and made a little hut of wood and wattle. They dug a bit of ground for beans. They made a cross out of two hazel sticks. They said the psalms morning and evening, and Gall, who had been forbidden to say Mass, said everything else he was allowed to. He prayed. He kept the hours. He talked to God in the quiet, and I think, from what comes next, that the quiet taught him a good deal.

And it is in this little valley, on a cold evening, some time in the first winter, that our bear comes in.

Gall and Hiltibod had made their fire at the edge of the clearing. They were eating supper. Supper was a fish that Hiltibod had caught in the stream, and some bread, and a bit of something that might have been cabbage. Hiltibod had gone down to the water to wash his hands. Gall was sitting alone, with the last piece of bread, looking at the sparks.

And then, as I said at the beginning, the bear arrived.

The old life says it came out of the forest, "a bear of great size," and that it came near the fire, and that it was looking for food. Now this, as you might imagine, is the moment in a story when a person might reasonably scream. Gall did not scream. He sat very still. And I think we should imagine his heart doing something unusual, because he was a human being and not a statue. But the old life says he looked at the bear, and the bear looked at him, and in the old lives that is exactly the moment where a saint turns out to be a saint, which is to say, a person who does the kind thing with a quaking heart.

"Brother bear," said Gall, in a voice that trembled just slightly, "I am afraid there is not a great deal. But there is some bread. And you are welcome to it. On one condition."

The bear tilted its great head.

"There is a lot of wood in this forest," said Gall, "and I am rather short on strong arms. If you would be so kind, I should like you to carry some logs to the fire. And then there is bread."

And the old story says, quite simply, that the bear went away into the trees. It came back with a log in its mouth. It put the log on the fire, with a small and careful bump. Then it looked at Gall.

Gall, who did not argue with the terms of a bargain, handed it the bread.

The bear ate it, with great seriousness. It sat for a moment. And then it turned and went back into the forest, and it came back with another log. And Gall, who was a person of his word, said that the loaf had been for the first log, and the second log was a gift, and the bear could rest. But the bear kept on. It brought wood, according to the old story, for as long as there was a fire. And in the morning, Hiltibod came back from the stream to find a pile of logs at the door of the hut taller than himself, and Gall sitting beside it, calmly saying his morning prayers.

"Where did all that wood come from?" said Hiltibod.

"A friend," said Gall.

Now. That is the bear. And I want to say a word about it, because the bear is the most famous thing about Gall, and it is a story that people tell a little too quickly.

Does it really happen? I do not know. The old life that we have was written down by a monk named Walafrid Strabo, who lived in the ninth century, more than two hundred years after Gall, and who was working from an older text that has not come down to us. He was a clever man and an honest one, and he says in his own preface that he has tidied the language and kept the facts. But two hundred years is a long time, and stories grow in the telling, the way bread grows in the oven.

But I will tell you what I think the story is for.

I think it is a story about how to meet a stranger who is bigger than you. Most of us, faced with a large and hungry thing, would do one of two things. We would run, or we would fight. Gall did something neither of them. He invited the bear to join in. He did not pretend that the bear was not a bear. He did not pretend that he was not afraid. He simply said, here is the bread, here is the work, and there is room at this fire. And the story says that the thing that could have hurt him instead became the one who kept his fire burning.

And it also says something about how Gall saw the world. For the Irish monks, all of creation was a kind of cloister. The animals were not enemies and not machines. They were fellow creatures, with a place in God's house, and a bear, if you asked it politely, might well like to be useful. This is the same love that sits behind the story of Saint Kevin and the blackbird, and Saint Columba and the white horse, and Saint Francis and the wolf, who came some six hundred years later and who, you will remember, was also asked to behave, and was also fed. The saints, it turns out, tend to be on good terms with the animals, and I have never been able to decide whether that is because the saints are so gentle, or because the animals have better judgment than we do.

The winter went by. And slowly, the hut in the valley became a little cluster of huts, and the garden became a field, and the one deacon became a handful of others, because, as it turned out, a man who is kind to a bear is hard for the neighbours to ignore.

The people of the lake began to visit. They came up the long path through the trees, in ones and twos, with their sick children, and their worries, and their questions. And Gall, who had a gift for languages, and had forgotten nothing of what he had learned on the shore, sat with them and listened. I imagine that he did a good deal of listening. I imagine a woman telling him, at some length, about her cow. I imagine a man with a toothache. I imagine a very old person asking if it was true that the God of the Christians did not mind about the old gods of the river, and Gall saying, carefully, that God minded very much about everything he had made, and that the river was one of them, and that the river was not a god, but a gift, and that the one who gave it was worth thanking.

The old lives tell a number of stories of what happened next, some of which we will leave out, because they are about evil spirits, and this is bedtime. But one thing they tell, which is easy to believe, is that people loved him. They came to him for help. And when the bishop of the neighbouring town died, the people and the duke of the region came to Gall, and asked him to be their bishop.

Gall said no.

He said it politely. He said, as far as the old lives report, that he was a monk, and that he had made his promise to live by the rule of Columbanus, and that a bishop's life was a different sort of life, and that there was a young deacon in the town, a man named John, who would do the job well. John, he said, had the learning and the heart. And the duke, who did not usually have this kind of reply from people he offered jobs to, frowned for a bit and then said, "Very well."

So John became bishop. And the old lives tell a charming little story, which I will only half believe, that at the day of the consecration, John, who was educated, but did not know the local language, asked Gall to preach the sermon in his place. And Gall got up, in front of the whole town, and spoke in the language of the lake, and was understood by everyone. And the old story says that the bishop sat down afterwards and said quietly to Gall, "It is as well I asked."

Now we come to the part of the story that is, I think, the saddest and the sweetest, and it concerns Columbanus.

Remember that Columbanus had gone south, over the Alps, to Italy. He had founded a new monastery at a place called Bobbio, in the hills, and he had grown old there. And one day, when he was a very old man, near the end of his life, he called for his companion Magnoald, who had been with him from the old days, and who had been with Gall by the lake before he left.

"Brother," said Columbanus, "I am going to die soon. When I am gone, I want you to go to Gall."

"Go to Gall?" said Magnoald.

"Take my staff," said Columbanus. "And tell him that I am no longer angry. And tell him that I release him from what I said. Tell him he can say Mass."

And Magnoald, who had waited many years to hear those words, and who had known all along that his master loved Gall as much as anyone, set out for the north with the old man's staff in his hand.

He crossed the Alps in the snow. He came down to the lake. He went up the long path through the trees. And he found, in the valley of the singing river, a little group of buildings, and a man standing at the door of the church who had grown a good deal older, and rather grey.

"Gall," said Magnoald. "I have a message."

And Gall looked at the staff. And he knew it. He had seen it a thousand times, in the hand of the one who had taught him everything. And the old life says that he wept, as one weeps when a thing that has hurt for a very long time suddenly stops hurting, and the whole thing turns out to have been, all along, a kind of love.

"He is dead?" said Gall.

"He is," said Magnoald. "He sent me before the end, and he sent this. He said to tell you that the thing he said to you was too hard. And that he is sorry."

"There is nothing to be sorry for," said Gall. "He told me to stay and to wait. I stayed. I waited. And I have been very happy."

Then, the old story says, he said Mass for the soul of Columbanus. And I have always thought that this is one of the nicest endings in all the old lives: a man who was told to be silent for the sake of obedience, and who was silent for years, and who, when the silence was lifted, did not say a word about what he had suffered. He just said the Mass, and prayed for the man who had asked him to stop.

Gall lived, the lives say, to be very old. He is said to have lived to nearly ninety, though old lives like to give their saints round and impressive figures, and the dates of his death are one of the things that scholars still argue about. Some say it was in the year six hundred and forty, some say later, and some are not sure of the year at all. What is agreed is that he died in the middle of the seventh century, in a little place called Arbon, by the shore of the lake, among friends, on the sixteenth day of October.

And here is a thing that always makes me smile. Gall never founded a monastery. Not on purpose. He never wrote a rule, or a great work of theology, or a book of sermons that anyone has kept. He lived in a valley, and kept a garden, and prayed, and talked to people in their own language, and said no to being a bishop. And in the end, almost a hundred years after he died, a priest named Othmar came to the valley, and found Gall's old cell, and a little church built around his grave, and he said, "Something should be done with this place." And so he started a monastery, in the year seven hundred and nineteen, and called it by the name of the man who had loved it first.

That monastery was the abbey of Saint Gall. And it grew, and grew, and it became one of the great houses of learning in all of Europe.

I want to tell you what happened to it, because it is lovely, and a little bit funny, and a good way to end.

The monks of Saint Gall were, like Gall's own people, Irish in spirit, and so they loved books. They copied them. They kept them. They had a scriptorium, which was a room full of monks with pens, and in the cold months they sat with their fingers stiff and their ink freezing, and wrote out the Gospels, and the works of Augustine, and the grammar of Priscian, and a hundred other things. And some of them, apparently, got a little bored, because in the margins of the old manuscripts of Saint Gall, you can still find little notes in their handwriting. One says that the parchment is thin. One says that the ink is bad. One, in Old Irish, is a little poem about a blackbird whistling outside the window of a scribe.

Now: remember, these notes are tiny. They were written in the margin by tired monks more than a thousand years ago. They are not the kind of thing that anyone would think to keep. But they were kept. And the abbey library of Saint Gall still exists. It is in the town that grew up around the old monastery, a town that is still called Saint Gallen, and it is one of the oldest libraries in the world that is still open. If you went there today, you could see books that were written when the monks who made them were alive. You could see a beautiful baroque hall, with painted ceilings, and a floor of polished wood, and visitors in soft felt slippers, so as not to scratch the boards.

And among the treasures, you could see a very particular document. It is a large piece of parchment, on which a monk, around the year eight hundred and twenty, drew a plan. It is not a plan of the abbey itself. It is a plan of an ideal monastery, a sort of dream of what a monastery might be, with a church and a cloister and a kitchen and a brewery and a hospital and a garden and a house for the guests and a place for the geese. It shows everything a community of monks might need, laid out in red ink with notes in tiny letters. Nobody ever built it exactly as drawn. But it was kept, and it is still there, and historians have studied it for centuries to understand how a medieval monastery was meant to work.

I rather like the geese.

So you see, from a thorn, and a fever, and a bear, comes a library. From a man who was told to stay, comes a town. From a sick monk in a hut by a waterfall, with a deacon and half a loaf of bread, comes one of the memories of Europe.

Let me tell you how the old lives say that Gall ended.

He was an old man, and he had been preaching one day at Arbon, at the invitation of the bishop. He was ill again, perhaps the same fever, perhaps a different one. And he lay down in the little house of a priest, and the monks came and sat with him, and he told them to keep praying, and to keep the fire lit, and to be kind to each other, and to be kind to the people of the lake, and, the old story adds, to be kind to the bears.

And the old lives say that on the sixteenth of October, in the afternoon, with the autumn light coming gold through the window, he went home to God. It was very quiet. The people say there was a smell of apples in the room, but that may be the old story again.

They carried him back to his valley. They buried him there, beside the stream, in the place he had loved. And for almost a hundred years there was nothing at that grave but a little church, and a path, and the sound of the water. But the pilgrims came. They always came. And when Othmar finally arrived to build, the first thing he found was a path worn smooth by feet.

I would like to leave you with a quiet thought, and then a short note about what we have used.

The thought is this. Gall was not the strongest of the Irish monks. He was not the loudest. He did not lead the expedition. He did not write the rule. He was the one who got sick, and stayed behind, and was told off, and waited. And yet it is his name that the town carries, and his valley that grew into a library. That seems to me to be one of the oldest lessons in the world, and one of the gentlest. The people who are left behind are not forgotten by God. The ones who wait, and are kind, and share their bread, and do the next small thing, are very often the ones who end up building the thing that lasts.

So if you are tired tonight, or a bit unwell, or you have been told you must stay put while everyone else gets on, you are in good company. There is a bear, somewhere, who will bring the firewood. Perhaps not tonight. But in God's time.

Now, a few notes for the curious.

The main facts of Gall's life, that he was an Irish monk, that he travelled with Columbanus to the continent, that he stayed by Lake Constance when Columbanus went to Italy, and that he lived as a hermit in the Steinach valley, are well attested by the early Irish and continental sources, though the very oldest written life of him has not survived. What we have is a series of lives, the earliest written within a century or two of his death, and the fullest, by Walafrid Strabo, about two hundred years after it. Walafrid himself tells us he was tidying and improving an older text, and so the details, such as the bear, the thorn bush, the offer of the bishopric, and the staff of Columbanus, are best told with the words "the old story says."

The bear is the most famous of all these details, and for centuries a bear carrying a log has been the symbol of the city and canton of Saint Gallen. You can still see it today on the coat of arms. As for whether it happened, the church does not require anyone to believe it, and neither will we. But it has been told lovingly for twelve hundred years, and I think it says something true about the gentleness of the Irish monks and about how Gall met the world.

Gall is a saint of the early Church, before the great separation of East and West, and so he belongs to all of us. He is honoured in the Roman Martyrology on the sixteenth of October, and by Orthodox Christians who keep the saints of the first millennium. The Plan of Saint Gall, the library, and the town are real, and you can visit them.

What we have invented is small: the conversations, the jokes, the supper menus, and the exact manners of the bear. Everything else we have tried to give you as the old sources give it.

That's the story of Gall for tonight. His feast is kept on the sixteenth of October, and if you are in Switzerland, they will tell you the bear is still looking for bread. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And here is a well-loved Irish blessing, to take with you to sleep. May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the warm rain fall softly on your fields, and until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand. Goodnight, and God bless.

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