THE MAID AT POITIERS (_continued_) A belief, common to learned and ignorant alike, ascribed special virtues to the state of virginity.

Such ideas had been handed down from a remote antiquity; their origin was pre-Christian; they were an immemorial inheritance, one part of which came from the Gauls and Germans, the other from the Romans and Greeks.

In the land of Gaul there still lingered a memory of the sacred beauty of the white priestesses of the forest; and sometimes in the Island of Sein, along the misty shores of the Ocean, there wandered the shades of those nine sisters at whose bidding, in days of yore, the tempest raged and was stilled.
According to these beliefs, which had dawned in the childhood of races, the gift of prophecy is bestowed on virgins alone.

It is the heritage of a Cassandra or a Velleda.

It was said that Sibyls had prophesied the coming of Jesus Christ.