CHAPTER XI.
SANTA BARBARA.
"Saints will aid if men will call, For the blue sky bends o'er all." Sweet sixteen and an "awful dad." Santa Barbara and Dioscurus.

Such a cruel story, and so varied in version that the student of sacred legend gets decidedly puzzled.

The fair-haired daughter was advised secretly by Origen, who sent a pupil disguised as a physician to instruct her in the Christian faith.

She insisted on putting three windows instead of two into the bathroom of the tower to which her father sent her, either to prevent her from marrying or to imprison her until she would wed one of the many gay young suitors.

These three windows showed her belief in the Trinity, which she could not have learned from Origen, as among Christians he was regarded as heretical, and his followers were Unitarians and Universalists combined, adding the cheerful theory of the "second opportunity" and that all punishment from sin would have an end, yet clinging to the old pagan mythology and believing that sun, moon, stars, and the ocean all had souls--a "Neo-Platonist." Refusing to recant, Barbara was arraigned and condemned to death.