Romanus had given him a hair shirt and a monastic habit made of skins. He slept on the bare ground and waged constant war on all the impulses of the flesh. That rebelled, fiercely. Many a temptation assailed him. The remembered beauty of one woman in Rome continually haunted him, and very nearly dragged him forth from his cave to go and find her; but when that thought came to him he pulled off his fur robe and rolled his young body in a clump of thorns that grew on the platform of his cave, till it was all one bleeding wound, and his soul regained the mastery. [Illustration: STATUE OF ST. BENEDICT. In a cave at Subiaco, near Tivoli.] Seven centuries afterwards St. Francis came from Assisi to visit the spot. He knelt there long, and shed many tears over the thicket of thorns. Then he planted two rose trees there, and the thorns gave place to roses that have bloomed for eight hundred summers, and were blooming when I saw them, with never a thorn on their stems. But every leaf of their foliage has a little white line zig-zagging across it—to mark the flight of the defeated Serpent from St. Benedict’s Eden. There is a pretty story that tells how, after nearly three years, the hermit’s retreat was discovered. Sometimes the devil, in sheer spite (or maybe the chafing points of rock on which Romanus was letting down the bread) would cut the string, and then, as Romanus could not come back till the next day, poor young Benedict, his whole supply for twenty-four hours whirled away into the river below, would grow faint and hungry before his benefactor could reach him again. The devil is always rampantly busy at holy seasons—it enrages him to see everybody trying to be good—and when Benedict had held out against him for three solid years, he selected Easter Sunday for one of these wicked tricks. Romanus’s string snapped, the loaf plunged into the river, and Benedict, always blessing God, resigned himself and went on with his prayers. The pangs of hunger made themselves felt with painful persistence, but he tried to take no notice of them. Not so his kind Creator. In His love for this faithful child He spoke to a good parish priest who was sitting down to his Easter dinner at that moment with a glad heart. “How canst thou enjoy these luxuries while a servant of God is pining for food?” The good priest sprang up, gathered together all that he could carry, and, leaving his own dinner untouched, started out to find the suffering recluse. He knew not his name or his dwelling, but angels guided his steps and helped him to reach the inaccessible cave. There, instead of some aged penitent, he found a tall boy, with beautiful, serious eyes, and lithe and strong, though his body, clothed in tattered skins, was terribly thin. Benedict was as much surprised as his visitor. The latter spread the good things before him and bade him eat.