But let that be.

I want to tell you of myself, that you may judge with what authority I speak.
"I was destined," Agostino, for a soldier's life in the following of my valiant foster-brother, your father.

Had I preserved the strength of my early youth, undoubtedly a soldier's harness would be strapped here to-day in the place of this scapulary.

But it happened that an illness left me sickly and ailing, and unfitted me utterly for such a life.
Similarly it unfitted me for the labour of the fields, so that I threatened to become a useless burden upon my parents, who were peasant-folk.

To avoid this they determined to make a monk of me; they offered me to God because they found me unfitted for the service of man; and, poor, simple, self-deluded folk, they accounted that in doing so they did a good and pious thing.
"I showed aptitude in learning; I became interested in the things I studied; I was absorbed by them in fact, and never gave a thought to the future; I submitted without question to the wishes of my parents, and before I awakened to a sense of what was done and what I was, myself, I was in orders." He sank his voice impressively as he concluded--"For ten years thereafter, Agostino, I wore a hair-shirt day and night, and for girdle a knotted length of whip-cord in which were embedded thorns that stung and chafed me and tore my body.