The robust and energetic youth very soon showed the rarest aptitude for monastic life, not only for cenobitical exercises, but, above all, for the missionary work, which was the principal occupation of monks in that country and period. He was not content merely to surpass all the other monks in his devotion to the four principal occupations of monastic life--study, prayer, vigil, and manual labour--but speedily applied himself to the work of casting out from the hearts of the surrounding population the last vestiges of pagan superstition. Not a village was so distant, not a mountain side so steep, not a village so poor, that it escaped his zeal. He sometimes passed weeks, and even months, out of his monastery, preaching to and confessing the rustic population of the mountains. The roads were very bad, or rather there were no roads; only now and then was it possible to travel on horseback; sometimes, when his course lay along the coast of the district inhabited by the Picts, he would take the help of a boat. But generally it was on foot that he had to penetrate into the glens and distant valleys, crossing the heaths and vast table-lands, uncultivated and uninhabited, where a few shepherd's huts, like that in which he himself had passed his childhood, and which were in winter abandoned even by the rude inhabitants, were thinly scattered. But neither the intemperance of the seasons, nor hunger, nor thirst, arrested the young and valiant missionary in his apostolic travels, to seek the scattered population, half Celts, and half Anglo-Saxons, who, though already Christian in name and by baptism, retained an obstinate attachment to many of their ancient superstitions, and who were quickly led back by any great calamity, such as one of the great pestilences which were then so frequent, to the use of magic, amulets, and other practices of idolatry. The details which have been preserved of the wonders which often accompanied his wanderings, show that his labours extended over all the hilly district between the two seas--from the Solway to the Forth. They explain to us how the monks administered the consolations and the teaching of religion, before the organization of parishes, ordained by archbishop Theodore, had been everywhere introduced or regulated. As soon as the arrival of one of these apostolic missionaries in a somewhat central locality was known, all the population of the neighbourhood hastened to hear him, endeavouring with fervour and simplicity to put in practice the instruction they received from him. Cuthbert, especially, was received among them with affectionate confidence; his eloquence was so persuasive that it brought the most rebellious to his feet, to hear their sins revealed to them, and to accept the penance which he imposed upon them.