"This letter, and another which I sent you, I have written with my own hand from this isolated fortress, with many sighs and abundance of tears, so that seeing with my eyes, I did not see. But I was full of admiration at myself, and at the goodness of God, considering his mercy towards creatures, who have reason in them, and his providence, which abounded upon me, giving and providing me with the aptitude for writing for my comfort, I having been deprived of that consolation, which by reason of my ignorance I knew not. So that on descending from the height (does this mean 'on coming out of my trance,' or 'on leaving this fortress?') I might have some little vent for the feelings of my heart, so that it should not burst. Not being willing to take me as yet out of this darksome life, God formed it in my mind in a wonderful manner, as the master does to the child, to whom he gives an exemplar. So that, as soon as ever he was gone from me, together with the glorious Evangelist John, and Thomas Aquinas, sleeping I began to learn." Now the entire value of this incident in the eyes of the fourteenth, and the entire incredibility of it in the eyes of the nineteenth century, and consequently its stringency as evidence against the sincerity of St. Catherine, depends on the length of time intervening between the moment when she began to learn in her sleep, and that at which she first wrote. All her own admiration of herself and of God's providence in the matter, all her own belief in miracle, and her beginning to learn in her sleep, we may admit without founding thereon any impeachment of her sincerity. Nor need we be accurate in taking the sense of her statement, that she then _began_ to learn. Most people would find it difficult to say when they began to learn most things. And on the other hand the phrase would seem to express, that she did not _complete_ her learning to write in that same trance. We have other indications also of a gradual advance in the art. The long letter, in which the Saint makes the above statement, is certainly not the first product of her new acquirement. She speaks of having written a former letter to the same correspondent. But neither was that her first writing. In the evidence given by the Beato Tomaso Caffarini on the occasion of the examination of her pretensions to canonization, he deposes: "I further testify, that I heard from Master Stephen,[26] of Siena," by means of letters from him, how that this Virgin, after that she miraculously learned to write, rising up from prayer with a desire of writing, wrote with her own hand a _little_ letter (litterulam), which she sent to the said Master Stephen, and in which was the following conclusion, written, that is to say, in her own vernacular: "Know, my son, that this is the first letter, which I ever wrote;"—much such a first attempt as the most unmiraculously taught of penmen might be likely to make. [Sidenote: HER FIRST PENMANSHIP.]