into your confidence.


Then it is easy to see how, as Stanislaus grew older, he liked to
pray, he liked to talk about God and our Lady. You see, he had
grown to know them. They were not remote, far away. They were as
near to him as his own folk. They were his own folk. And it is
easy to see how, keeping in God's sight all the time, he kept his
soul clean and his heart merry.


CHAPTER IV

OFF TO VIENNA

In this way Stanislaus went on until he was nearly fourteen years
old and his brother Paul was approaching fifteen. Then the Lord
John Kostka thought his boys had better continue their studies, not
at home, but at a regular school. He picked out John Bilinski, a
young man who had lately completed his college course, as tutor for
them. He gave them a couple of servants, mounted them all on good
horses, and sent them off six hundred miles or more on horseback to
Vienna.

You may be sure Stanislaus enjoyed the long ride. It would be
strange if he, a nobleman of the finest cavalry nation in the world,
were not a good horseman. He loved the smell of the open fields, he
loved the boisterous song of the mountain torrent. The hills and
the plains were his home, for the hills and the plains were nearer
to God than the houses of men.