We owe the following narrative to St. Gregory of Tours:
"I will not pass over what happened in the East for confirmation of the Catholic Faith. A certain Jewish glass-worker's child who was at school with Christian boys, one day, whilst at Mass in the Basilica of the Blessed Virgin Mary, went, though himself a Jewish boy, with other children to receive the Glorious Body and Blood of the Lord. After having received the Holy Sacrament, he returned with gladness to his father's house. Full of joy he told what he had received. But the father, who hated Christ and His religion, said : ' Since forgetful of the religion of thy fathers, thou hast communicated with those children—to avenge the injury done to the Law of Moses—thy father though I be, I will kill thee without mercy.' Then, taking his child to the mouth of a burning furnace, he threw him in, and, laying on more wood that it might burn the more fiercely, he stood by. But that same Mercy, which bathed of old, with the cloud of dew, the Three Hebrew Children cast into the Chaldean furnace, failed not now. For it did not suffer him either, as he lay in the midst of the flames and heaps of live coals, to be in any way injured. Now, when the mother heard that the father had determined to burn their child to death, she ran to save him. But on seeing the fire blazing out from the yawning mouth of the furnace with overpowering flame, she cast to the ground the ornament from off her head, and dishevelling her hair with woeful laments, filled the whole neighbourhood with her cries. When then the Christians learned what had happened, they all ran up together to the iniquitous sight, and after extricating the burning embers from the mouth of the furnace, they found the little boy lying down as though on a bed of the softest feathers. On his being taken out, they were all in a marvel to find him unhurt, and the place was filled with their shouts, and in this way the whole people gave praise to the Lord. . . . Then they asked the little fellow what sort of a fireshade (umbraculum) he had in the flames, and he said : ' The Lady—sitting in the chair in that Basilica where I received Bread from the Table, who bears in her Bosom a little tiny Infant—she it was who covered me with her mantle, so that the fire might not devour me.' There is no doubt at all but that the Blessed Mary appeared to him. The child, then, having been instructed in the Catholic Faith, believed in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and being washed, together with his mother, in the saving waters, was born once more."
