did justice in avenging the death of her son. On a time S. Gregory went by the market of Rome which is called the market of Trajan, and then he remembered of the justice and other good deeds of Trajan, and how he had been piteous and debonair, and was much sorrowful that he had been a paynim, and he turned to the church of S. Peter wailing for the horror of the miscreance of Trajan. Then answered a voice from God saying: 'I have now heard thy prayer, and have spared Trajan from the pain perpetual.' By this, as some say, the pain perpetual due to Trajan as a miscreant was somedeal taken away, but for all that was not he quit from the prison of hell; for the soul may well be in hell and feel there no pain, by the mercy of God. And after, it is said that the angel in his answer said more to thus: 'Because thou hast prayed for a paynim, God granteth thee to choose of two things that one which thou wilt; or thou shalt be two days in purgatory in pain, or else all the days of thy life thou shalt languish in sickness.' Then answered S. Gregory that he had liefer to have sickness all his life in this world, than to feel by two days the pains of purgatory. And ever after he had continually the fevers, or axes, or the gout in his feet, and hereof himself maketh mention in one his epistle, and saith: 'I am so much tormented of the gout in my feet and of other sicknesses that my life is to me a great pain; every day meseemeth that I ought to die, and always I abide the death. Some time my pain is little, and some time right great, but it is not so little that it departeth from me, ne so great that it bringeth me to
