II. MONT VELAN 513

became abbess in 949, and remained abbess till her death; -the Queen Bertha herself residing chiefly near her, in a tower on Mount Albis.

39. In 950 Bertha had to mourn the death of her son-in-law Lothaire, and the imprisonment of her daughter Adelaide on the Lake of Garda. But Otho the Great, of Germany, avenged Lothaire, drove Berenger out of Italy, and himself married Adelaide, reinstating Conrad of Burgundy on the throne of Burgundy and Switzerland: and then Bertha, strong at once under the protection of the king her son, and the emperor her son-in-law, and with her mother beside her, Abbess of the Convent des Dames Nobles of Zurich, began her work of perfect beneficence to the whole of Switzerland.

In the summer times, spinning from her distaff as she rode, she traversed-the legends say, with only a country guide to lead her horse, (when such a queen’s horse would need leading!)-all the now peaceful fields of her wide dominion, from Jura to the Alps. My own notion is that an Anne-of-Geierstein-like maid of honour or two must have gleamed here and there up and down the hills beside her;¹ and a couple of old knights, perhaps, followed at their own pace. Howsoever, the queen verily did know her peasants, and their cottages and fields, from Zurich to Geneva, and ministered to them for full twelve years.

40. In 962, her son Conrad gave authority almost monarchic, to her Abbey of Payerne, which could strike a coinage of its own. Not much after that time, her cousin Ulrich, Bishop of Strasbourg, came to visit her; and with him and the king her son, she revisited all the religious institutions she had founded, and finally, with them both, consecrated the Church of Neuchâtel to the Virgin. The Monastery of the Great St. Bernard was founded at the same time.

I cannot find the year of her death, but her son Conrad died in 993, and was buried beside his mother at Payerne.²

¹ [See the first appearance of Anne of Geierstein among the hills at the end of chap. ii. of the novel.]

² [See Gaullieur, p. 97.]

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