From Milan his friend Alipius preceded him to Rome, and there "was damnably delighted" with the gladiatorial combats, being "made drunk with a delight in blood." Augustine followed him to Rome, and there lost the girl of his heart, "so that my heart was wounded, as that the very blood did follow." The lady had made a vow of eternal chastity, "having left me with a son by her." But he fell to a new love as the old one was departed, and yet the ancient wound pained him still "after a more desperate and dogged manner." _Haeret letalis arundo_! By these passions his conversion was delayed, the carnal and spiritual wills fighting against each other within him. "Give me chastity and continency, O Lord," he would pray, "but do not give it yet," and perhaps this is the frankest of the confessions of Saint Augustine. In the midst of this war of the spirit and the flesh, "Behold I heard a voyce, as if it had been of some boy or girl from some house not farre off, uttering and often repeating these words in a kind of singing voice, "_Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege_, Take up and read, take up and read." So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner of his Virgilian lots, read:-- "Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in causality and uncleanness," with what follows. "Neither would I read any further, neither was there any cause why I should." Saint Augustine does not, perhaps, mean us to understand (as his translator does), that he was "miraculously called." He knew what was right perfectly well before; the text only clinched a resolve which he has found it very hard to make. Perhaps there was a trifle of superstition in the matter. We never know how superstitious we are. At all events, henceforth "I neither desired a wife, nor had I any ambitious care of any worldly thing." He told his mother, and Monica rejoiced, believing that now her prayers were answered. Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine. It was the maturing of an old purpose, and long deferred. Much stranger stories are told of Bunyan and Colonel Gardiner. He gave up rhetoric; another man was engaged "to sell words" to the students of Milan. Being now converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, except for his account of his mother's death, and of that ecstatic converse they held "she and I alone, leaning against a window, which had a prospect upon the garden of our lodging at Ostia." They "Came on that which is, and heard The vast pulsations of the world." "And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, we grew able to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of our hearts, and we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the very top and flower of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the noyse of language again, where words are begun and ended."