Thomas’s youth seems to have been uneventful, with the exception of the calamity by which he lost a younger sister, who was killed by lightning while sleeping by his side. In his fifth year his education began. Less than five miles away, as the bird flies, lay the Monte Casino, the greatest and first of the monasteries of the Benedictine order. Here it was that Benedict of Nursia in 529 laid the foundation of the first great order of Western Christendom. And although Monte Casino had shared in the calamity of Aquino at the hands of the Lombards, and had lain desolate for a hundred and fifty years, it had been rebuilt with new splendor, and was at this time the grandest ecclesiastical establishment outside the city of Rome. And here, in 1227, Landulf Sinibald, himself of the Aquino family, had become abbot, thus attaining one of the highest dignities open to a Churchman. To his care the young Thomas was intrusted, and on Monte Casino he spent the next seven years of his life, undergoing the discipline and receiving the instruction for which the schools of the Benedictine fathers had always been famous. Probably it was the hope of the family of Aquino that the young man would enter the order and rise to the same dignity as his uncle, becoming a prince of the Church, and thus more powerful and wealthy than any of his uncles or brothers. In 1239 the second outbreak of hostilities between the Pope and the Emperor led to the conversion of Monte Casino into a great fortress, in which were left but eight monks to carry on the routine of monastic services. The rest found a home in other Benedictine houses, the schools were suspended, and Thomas returned home. But the same year he seems to have proceeded to Naples to study in the university which Frederic had established in 1224, and amply endowed with wealth and privileges, and had revived in 1234, after its suspension during his first war with the papacy. He had forbidden his Italian subjects to leave the kingdom to attend foreign universities, and he had used every available means to make them contented with that of Naples, one of these being the employment of the ablest teachers he could secure in all the sciences then recognized as belonging to the higher education. We are told that Thomas pursued his studies two years in Naples, when the influence of his Dominican teachers led him to form the purpose to become a Dominican friar,[14] and to put on the garb of a novice. This step was a most momentous one. Whether his family looked forward to his becoming a Benedictine monk and abbot, or contemplated his embracing the offers of promotion in the civil service of the kingdom, which Frederic II. had held out to the graduates of his pet university, they could not but regard his adoption of the life of a mendicant friar with indignation and disgust. To be a Benedictine _Pater_ was to be a gentleman and a scholar, to have a share in the influence, wealth, and power of the