Now when more than three and a half centuries had gone by, and Agelwyn the Great-hearted was Abbot, there was a Saxon noble, young and dissolute, who had been stricken by the Yellow Plague, and, after three days' sickness, had been abandoned by his friends and followers in what seemed to be his last agony.  For the Yellow Plague was a sickness so ghastly and dreadful that men called it the Yellow Death, and fled from it as swiftly as they might.  But in the dead and dark of the third night a beautiful Child, crowned with roses and bearing in his hand a rose, had come to the dying thane and said: "Now mayest thou see that the best the world can give--call it by what name thou wilt and prize it at its utmost worth--is nothing more than these: wind and smoke and a dream and a flower.  But though all have fled from thee and left thee to die alone in grievous plight, this night thou shalt not die."