Excerpt from Legends of Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church The Legends of St. Joseph, here given to the public, have been gathered by the reve rend compiler from many sources. They all partake, more or less, of the legendary charac ter, in so far as the manner of relating goes, although several are strictly and historically true, and taken from the archives of cities or religious houses. Some, like The Rod in Blossom, The Shepherds of Bethlehem, The First Christmas Night, and a few others, are in strict conformity with the Scrip tural narrative while others are more or less embellished by the pious fancies of the faith ful, - filling up, as it were, in process of time, the somewhat meagre details of gospel and ecclesiastical history. Some, again, are well authenticated facts of quite recent occur rence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.