h great fervor and
affection for four months. During this time he learned the Psalter by
heart, the first task enjoined the novices; and his familiarity with the
sacred oracles it contains, greatly helped to nourish his soul in a
spiritual life. Though yet in his tender youth, he practised all the
austerities of the house; and, by his humility and charity, gained the
good-will of all the monks. Having here spent two years, he removed to
the monastery of Heliodorus, a person endowed with an admirable spirit
of prayer; and who, being then sixty-five years of age, had spent
sixty-two of them in that community, so abstracted from the world, as to
be utterly ignorant of the most obvious things in it, as Theodoret
relates, who was intimately acquainted with him. Here Simeon much
increased his mortifications; for whereas those monks ate but once a
day, which was towards night, he, for his part, made but one meal a
week, which was on Sundays. These rigors, however, he moderated at the
interposition of his superior's authority, and from that time was more
private in his mortifications. With this view, judging the rough rope of
the well, made of twisted palm-tree leaves, a proper instrument of
penance, he tied it close about his naked body, where it remained
unknown both to the community and his superior, till such time as it
having eat into his flesh, what he had privately done was discovered by
the stench proceeding from the wound. Three days successively his
clothes, which clung to it, were to be softened with liquids, to
disengage them; and the incisions of the physician, to cut the cord out
of his body, were attended with such anguish and pain, that he lay for
some time as dead. On his recovery, the abbot, to prevent the ill
consequences such a dangerous singularity might occasion, to the
prejudice of uniformity in monastic discipline, dismissed him.

After this he repaired to a hermitage, at the foot of mount Telnescin,
or Thelanissa, where he came to a resolution of passing the whole forty
days of Lent in a total abstinence, after the example of Christ, without
either eating or drinking. Bassus, a holy priest, and abbot of two
hundred monks, who was his director, and to whom he had communicated his
design, had left with him ten loaves and water, that he might eat if he
found it necessary. At the expiration of the forty days he came to visit
him, and found the loaves and water untouched, but Simeon stretched out
on the grou