could not shake off the impression
which the martyrs had made upon him; and, after completing his time of
service, he retired to the protection of some great friends in Sicca, his
brother's home already. Here he took a second wife of the old Numidian
stock, and supported himself by the produce of a small piece of land which
had been given to him for life by the imperial government. If trial were
necessary in order to keep alive the good seed which had been sown in his
heart, he found a never-failing supply of that article in the companion of
his declining years. In the hey-day of her youth she might have been
fitted to throw a sort of sunshine, or rather torchlight, on a military
carouse; but now, when poor Strabo, a man well to do in the world, looking
for peace, had fallen under her arts, he found he had surrendered his
freedom to a malignant, profligate woman, whose passions made her better
company for evil spirits than for an invalided soldier. Indeed, as time
went on, the popular belief, which she rather encouraged, went to the
extent that she actually did hold an intercourse with the unseen world;
and certainly she matured in a hatred towards God and man, which would
naturally follow, and not unnaturally betoken, such intercourse. The more,
then, she inflicted on him her proficiency in these amiable
characteristics, the more he looked out for some consolation elsewhere;
and the more she involved herself in the guilt or the repute of unlawful
arts, the more was he drawn to that religion, where alone to commune with
the invisible is to hold intercourse with heaven, not with hell. Whether
so great a trial supplied a more human inducement for looking towards
Christianity, it is impossible to say. Most men, certainly Roman soldiers,
may be considered to act on mixed motives; but so it was in fact, that, on
his becoming in his last years a Christian, he found, perhaps discovered,
to his great satisfaction, that the Church did not oblige him to continue
or renew a tie which bound him to so much misery, and that he might end
his days in a tranquillity which his past life required, and his wife's
presence would have precluded. He made a good end; he had been allowed to
take the blessed sacrament from the altar to his own home on the last time
he had been able to attend a _synaxis_ of the faithful, and thus had
communicated at least six months within his decease; and the priest who
anointed him at the beginning of his last ill