led his life after God's will, the wild beasts and birds have made friends with him? And the man who would separate himself from worldly thoughts, to him the very angels come near." When Guthlac died in due time, angelic songs were heard in the sky, and all the air had a wondrous odour of exceeding sweetness. ST. SIMEON STYLITES (A.D. 459). St. Simeon Stylites, who immortalised himself by living on a high pillar, flourished about 459, was the son of a shepherd, and in his youth displayed a genius for mortifications of the flesh. He begged admittance to a monastery, and at once outdid all the monks there; for while they ate only once a day, he ate only once a week, and that on Sunday. He at a later stage passed the forty days of each Lent without eating or drinking. Not content with a hermitage, he built himself a small unroofed enclosure of rude stones, on a high mountain forty miles east of Antioch, exposed to the weather. Crowds began to flock to see him and get his benediction. He next built a pillar six cubits high, and lived on it four years. He gradually raised higher pillars; and the fourth time he made a pillar of forty cubits (sixty feet) high, on which he spent his last twenty years of life. It was only three feet in diameter at the top, so that he might not have even the luxury of lying down or sitting. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross; but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet. He bowed his body in continual prayer, and a visitor once counted twelve hundred and forty-four reverences of adoration made by him in one day. He made exhortations to the people twice a day. He died at sixty-nine in the act of prayer on his pillar, and the bishops and all the people round attended his burial, and many miracles were said to have been worked that day in testimony of his sanctity. A PILLAR MONK IN WESTERN CLIMATES (A.D. 591). In 591 Vulfilaic, a monk of Lombardy, had a pillar erected for him at Treves, and stood upon it barefoot, enduring great hardship in the winter. The bishops therefore compelled him to come down and to live like other monks, telling him that the severity of the climate would not permit him to imitate the great Simeon of Antioch. He obeyed his superiors, but with tears and reluctance. And this, says Fleury, is the only instance that we know of a stylites or pillar monk in the Western world. ST. HERBERT, THE HERMIT OF DERWENTWATER (A.D. 650).