He had been commissioned, it is said, by St. Patrick to preach especially in those districts, which he himself had not visited. Accordingly we are told that Benen preached in Kerry, in Clare, and in South Connaught, the very localities which St. Patrick did not find time to visit. He blessed Connaught, too, with a special blessing from Bundrowes, near Bundoran, to Limerick, and the grateful natives paid to him and his successors a yearly tribute of milk and butter, calves and lambs, as well as first fruits of the rest of their produce. Now Kilbannon,[149] in South Connaught, was Benen's principal church, and continued to be for many centuries a very important religious foundation, as its ruined round tower still proves. But Benen was above all things a scholar and a psalm-singer, so he founded a school for young ecclesiastics in his monastery, of the history of which unfortunately we know little or nothing. He had at least one illustrious disciple, and that was St. Jarlath, afterwards Bishop of Tuam. It has been said that Jarlath could not have been a disciple of Benignus before A.D. 455, when the latter was transferred to Armagh. We answer that Jarlath was an old man in A.D. 512, when St. Brendan of Clonfert became his disciple at Cluainfois, near Tuam, and hence there is nothing to prevent Jarlath being a disciple of Benignus, if he were about the same age that Benignus himself was, when he became a disciple of St. Patrick. St. Jarlath founded his own college at Cluainfois towards the end of the fifth century. Colgan fixes the date at A.D. 510; but there are passages in the _Life of St. Brendan_, which go to show that it must have been founded at an earlier date, probably about the year A.D. 500. Of this college at Cluainfois, and of St. Jarlath's School at Tuam, we shall have something more to say hereafter. Lanigan, quoting the _Tripartite Life of St. Patrick_, says that there was an episcopal seminary at Elphin, in the County Roscommon, governed by St. Asicus, even at this early period. In truth all that we know of St. Asicus is derived from the _Tripartite_. The beautiful site on which the monastery was built got its name, _Ailfind_, from the white stone that was raised out of the well, which was made by Patrick in the green, and "that stone stands on the brink of the well," says the author of the _Tripartite_, "and it is called from the water"--that is, Elphin means the stone of the clear stream. That clear and bountiful spring still flows through the street of Elphin before the site of the monastery of Asicus, literally in the green, and it is only a short time since the stone itself was carried off by some profane hands. It is now, we believe, somewhere at or near the Protestant Church in the town of Elphin.