And this is the substance of all the Sienese editor has to tell us respecting the texts, manuscript and printed, on which his own has been formed. But the Saint's confessor, and one or two of her disciples, have recorded some circumstances respecting the lost originals of these letters which require to be noticed. It is stated in perfect accordance with all probability, that Catherine had never learned to read or write, as was in those days the case with the great majority of women in stations of life far superior to her own. Her biographer's account of her miraculously acquiring the power of reading by sudden endowment has been related in the preceding chapter. And at a later period of her life we are told that she similarly acquired the power of writing, "in order that she might be able," writes Girolamo Gigli in his Preface to the Letters, "to carry out the office of her apostolate by more agencies than one, and in more places than one, at the same time, Christ gave her by a wonderful method the use of the pen, in the short schooling of a trance, and by the teaching of St. John the Evangelist, and of the blessed Doctor, Aquinas, as the Saint herself affirms in a letter to the above-mentioned blessed Raymond her confessor." One of the most interesting points of inquiry in the life of St. Catherine turns on the question, more fully examined in a subsequent chapter, how far was she, or was she not, entirely sincere in her statements and pretensions. Now if she makes the statement attributed to her respecting her acquisition of the art of writing, it must be concluded that she was guilty of wilful imposture. No possible self-deception could have misled her as to the fact of her previous ignorance of writing, and as little as to that of her writing after the trance. It will be well therefore to observe accurately what she really does say herself upon the subject. In 1377, when she was in the thirtieth year of her age, after her return from Avignon, and before her final journey to Rome, she was inhabiting a villa belonging to the noble Sienese family of Salimbeni, situated on an isolated eminence overlooking the road to Rome, and called "Rocca d'Orcia." Hence she wrote a very long letter—the longest probably in the whole collection—occupying, as it does, twelve full octavo pages—to Father Raymond; and concludes it with the following lines. [Sidenote: HER POWER OF WRITING.]