countenance which it is almost impossible to restrain in such circumstances. The father abbot, however, said with severity, (as though he had no compassion for those sufferings in which he sympathized so truly,) that 'he spoke like a man of the world, and that a monk ought to manifest under the worst circumstances the constancy of his soul.' Benedict in an instant assumed that air of severity that never afterward quitted him. The fear lest the great exertions which he made by day and by night, combined with his extreme debility, might suddenly remove him, led them to give him the holy sacrament and extreme unction. He received both with every demonstration of piety. Such, however, was his weakness that he immediately fainted away. The father abbot having asked, before they brought him the extreme unction, if he desired that the whole community should be present at the ceremony, he answered that, 'exterior ceremonies were not of vital importance; that his brethren would derive little edification from him; and that he had more need of their prayers than their presence.' All his conversation during his malady was on the necessity of separation from worldly things, of the joy which he anticipated in death, and of the mercy which God had shown him in suffering him to end his days in the society of the father abbot. "Some days before his death, the father abbot inquired minutely into the state of his mind; he answered in these very words, 'I consider the day of my death as a festival; I have no desire for any thing here, and I cannot better express my total separation from things below than by comparing myself to a leaf which the wind has lifted from the earth. All that I have read in the sacred Scriptures comes home to me and fills me with joy. Nevertheless, I can in no action of my life see any thing which can sustain the judgment of God, and which is not worthy of punishment; but the confidence which I have in his goodness gives me hope and consolation.' He added, 'How can it be that God should show such compassion to a man who has so miserably served him? I desire death alone; what can a man be thinking of, not always to desire it? What joy, my father, when I remember that I am about to refresh myself in the waters of life.'