The visitor to Monte Cassino now leaves the station at San Germano, and hires donkeys for the ascent. The steep and stony path winds above the roofs of the houses of the town, and at every path opens fresh views of entrancing beauty. The silver thread of the Garigliano lies below, with towns studded on its banks; long ranges of mountains of the most beautiful outline break the horizon, billow after billow of intensest blue, crested as with a foam of snow. Little oratories by the wayside commemorate incidents in the life of S. Benedict. First comes that of S. Placidus, the favourite disciple of the patriarch; then that of Scholastica his sister; then one where he is supposed to have wrought a miracle; next a cross on a platform that indicates the place where brother and sister met for the last time—of which more anon. Then a grating and a cross where S. Benedict knelt to ask God’s blessing before he laid the foundation stone of his monastery. Benedict had been thirty-six years a monk before he came to Monte Cassino, and we know nothing of his sister’s life through all these years, save that she had maintained a still and holy converse with God. It is most probable that she had never tarried very far from her brother. Now that he settled at Monte Cassino, she came and planted herself with a little community of pious women at the foot of the mountain. Scholastica was as white in soul, as earnest, as devout as was Benedict. They were alike in everything save in sex; and she became, as unawares as himself, a mighty foundress—for if from him houses for men multiplied throughout the Western world, so was she the mother spiritual of innumerable similar refuges for holy women. At Monte Cassino, according to the expression of Pope Urban II., “the monastic life flowed from the heart of Benedict as from the fountain of Paradise,” and here it was that he composed his famous rule, that commenced with the words, “Hearken, O my sons” (_Ausculta o fili_). When he drew it up, not a notion came into his head that he was doing a work that would last, a work that was absolutely needed for the times, and without which the barbarians would never have been tamed and regenerated, and a new civilisation superior to the old rise out of the ashes of that which expired.