e day made a great meal for himself, but before he
could eat it he received a supernatural intimation that Benedict was
hungry in a pit, and he therefore took his dinner to him and they ate it
together. A blackbird once assailing Benedict's face was repelled by the
sign of the cross. Being tempted by a woman, Benedict crawled about
among briars and nettles to maintain his Spartan spirit. He now became
the abbot of a monastery, but the monks were so worldly that he had to
correct them. In retaliation they poisoned his wine, but the saint
making the sign of the cross over it, the glass broke in pieces and the
wine was innocuously spilt. Thereupon Benedict left the monastery and
returned to the desert, where he founded two abbeys and drove the devil
out of a monk who could not endure long prayers, his method being to
beat the monk. Here also, and in the other abbeys which he founded, he
worked many miracles: making iron swim, restoring life to the dead, and
so forth. Another attempt to poison him, this time with bread, was made,
but the deadly stuff was carried away from him by a pet raven. For the
rest of the saint's many wonderful deeds of piety you must seek _The
Golden Legend_: an agreeable task. He died in the year 518.

The best or most entertaining panels seem to me the first, in which the
little bald baby saint is being washed and his mother is being coaxed to
eat something; the fourth, where we see the saint, now a youth, on his
knees; the sixth, where he occupies the hermit's cell and the hermit
lets down food; the seventh, where the hermit and Benedict occupy the
cell together and a huntsman and dog pursue their game above; the tenth,
in the monastery; the twelfth, where the whip is being laid on; the
fourteenth, with an especially good figure of Benedict; the sixteenth,
where the meal is spread; the twentieth, with the devil on the tree
trunk; the twenty-first, when the fire is being extinguished; the
twenty-fifth, with soldiers in the distance; the twenty-seventh, with a
fine cloaked figure; the twenty-eighth, where there is a struggle for a
staff; the thirtieth, showing the dormitory and a cat and mouse; the
thirty-second, a burial scene; the thirty-third, with its monsters; the
thirty-sixth, in which the beggar is very good; the thirty-ninth, where
the soldiers kiss the saint's feet; and the forty-fourth, showing the
service in the church and the soldiers' arms piled up.

One would like to know more of this