When considering tales from the lives of the great saints, we should be more mindful of the moral imparted by the story than strictly attentive to the accuracy of its details.  We must take into account the perspective of the writer, his proximity to the events he describes, and his moral purposes.  To do anything less would defeat the purpose of the anecdote.  Yet I am confident that many of the stories related by the biographer of Euthymios the Younger (823 A.D.?–898 A.D.) are based on actual events, and are not the idle speculations of the cloister.  One of these stories we will now relate.

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