My lord has been feeling in his pouch and has slipped two of his few gold pieces into her hand, and, seeing that he is inclined to admire the babies, she covers them up and stalks away. Her demeanour has been rhadamanthine throughout. There must be no expression of admiration, no kissing or fondling of the little creatures before they are baptized. That would call the attention of the devil to the small unregenerates who are still his property. When the taint of original sin has been washed away they will be angels of innocence, beautiful cherubs to be shown proudly to all and sundry—but not before! So my lord sent for the priest, and pondered meanwhile on the names he would give the new son and daughter, little dreaming, good man, that fifteen centuries later those names would be household words to every Catholic ear and perpetuated in the colossal literature of sanctuaries of holiness and learning. He fixed on Benedict for the boy, and Scholastica for the girl, and, so far as I can trace, it was the first time the names had been used. Benedict means “the Blest” or “Well-spoken,” Scholastica signifies a lover of learning, or “the Well-taught”; so we may infer that the Lord of Norcia (it was called Nursia then) was a man of more education than most country gentlemen of those rough times, times of which history says, “Europe has perhaps never known a more calamitous or apparently desperate period than that which reached its climax at this date, the year 480. Confusion, corruption, despair, and death were everywhere; social dismemberment seemed complete. In all the ancient Roman world there did not exist a prince who was not either a pagan, or an Arian, or a Eutychian. In temporal affairs, the political edifice originated by Augustus—that monster assemblage of two hundred millions of human creatures, ‘of whom not a single individual was entitled to call himself free’—was crumbling into dust under the blows of the Barbarians.”[1] Nevertheless Rome still continued to be looked upon by the surrounding provinces as the centre of education—there was none, at any rate, to be had anywhere else within reach; and thither the Lord of Norcia, a descendant of the great family of the Anicia so often mentioned in the Roman chronicles, sent his son to be instructed in philosophy and law—the two subjects which still promised some kind of a career to an intelligent youth. Benedict was scarcely that yet—he was certainly not more than twelve years old, so much of a child that his nurse, Cyrilla, was sent with him to take care of him. Doubtless she found some respectable people with whom to lodge, and indeed one feels some pity for the simple countrywoman, charged with such a heavy responsibility in a strange and, as it must have seemed to her, a very wicked great city.