to marry her. Now in Africa girls become marriageable at a very early age.
They are married at fourteen, sometimes even at twelve. Perhaps she was
seventeen or eighteen at most when she married Patricius. She must have had
first a son, Navigius, whom we shall meet later on at Milan, and also a
daughter, of whom we do not even know the name, but who became a nun, and
superior of a convent in the diocese of Hippo. For us the features of these
two other children of Monnica and Patricius are obliterated. They are
concealed by the radiance of their illustrious great brother.

Monnica was fond of telling stories of her girlhood to her son. He has
handed down some of them to us.

She was brought up strictly, according to the system of that time. Both her
parents came of families which had been Christian, and Catholic-Christian,
for many generations. They had never been carried away by the Donatist
schism; they were people very obstinate in their convictions--a character
quite as frequent in Africa as its opposite, the kind of Numidian or Moor,
who is versatile and flighty. It is not unimportant that Augustin came from
this hard-headed race, for this it was, with the aid of God's grace, that
saved him--the energetic temper of his will.

Still, if the faith of the young Monnica was confirmed from her earliest
years, it is not so much to the lessons of her mother that she owed it,
as to the training of an old woman-servant of whom she always spoke with
gratitude. In the family of her master, this old woman had a place like the
one which to-day in a Turkish family is held by the nurse, the _dada_, who
is respected by all the harem and all the household. Doubtless she herself
was born in the house and had seen all the children born. She had carried
Monnica's father on her back when he was little, just as the Kabylian
women or the Bedouin nomads carry their babies still. She was a devoted