for him, and worked it out, bit
by bit.

When St. Benedict had learnt all that his tutors could teach him at home
his father sent him to the great city of Rome to learn there from the
scholars and learned men, and attend lectures and classes. St. Benedict
was a very clever boy, and he must have got on very quickly and pleased
his masters very much. He could probably have carried off all sorts of
prizes and won great fame and praise for himself, but there was
something which stopped him caring for things like that. In the great
city of Rome he saw two things--one of them was all sorts of wicked,
selfish, horrible, and ungodly pleasures in which men wasted their lives
and altogether forgot God; and the other was the beautiful, holy lives
of the Christians, many of whom could tell wonderful stories of the
martyrs who had been killed in Rome not so very long before, and whose
bodies lay in the Catacombs. There were some beautiful churches in the
city, and St. Benedict loved to go to the solemn services. As he knelt
there in the holy stillness, or listened to the chanting, he began to
_think_. And more and more he felt that all the glamour and selfish
pleasures and greediness of the people was stupid and wrong, and that
what was really worth having was a good conscience, and peace, and the
friendship of God. And as he thought, he began to care less and less for
his learning and his chances of glory, and he began to feel as if he
wanted to get right away from people and have the chance of thinking
about God.

When St. Benedict had these feelings he knew they came from God, and so,
instead of not listening and just letting himself get keen on his study
and his amusements, he made up his mind that he would always _do his
best_ to follow God's will, and would keep his heart _always listening_,
so that if God _did_ want to call him away to some special kind of life
he would be ready to hear and to obey.

Well, when anybody does this God does not fail to tell him what to do,
and so, when St. Benedict had been seven years in Rome, and was still
only a boy, God made known to him that he must leave Rome, and his
friends and his masters, and go right away into the mountains. His old
nurse, Cyrilla, had always stayed with him, faithfully; and now she
decided to go with him wherever it was that God was leading him.

So, one day, St. Benedict and Cyrilla set out secretly, and made their
way by hidden paths towards the mountains. At