Among the vast number of miracles related, it is difficult to find cases on which a charge of wilful fraud against the Dominican biographer can be safely pressed to conviction. In so many instances mistake may have been possible. In so many others, whatever he may have been inclined to believe in his own heart, he had no means of testing with certainty the truth of her statements to him; and, therefore, cannot be _convicted_ of falsehood for repeating them. He _may_ have believed them to be real facts. But one case of fair conviction is enough; and that we have in the statement of the total abstinence from food for many years. It should seem then, that although we may acquit Catherine of conscious deception, we must believe her confessor,—the Barnum, who "brought out" the wonder, introduced her to the world, and reaped the profit of her,—to be a rogue and impostor. Such a subject as this enthusiastic strong-willed cataleptic girl, was a rare and most valuable catch for the Dominican Order, and was to be turned to the best account accordingly. A real producible miracle-working Saint, who did veritably pass daily into a state of rapt extasy, and whose excitable and diseased brain was in that state ever prompt to impose on her imagination as realities whatever phantasmagoria of hallucinations her ghostly instructors chose to ply her waking fancy with, was a treasure calculated to bring much grist, spiritual as well as temporal, to the Dominican mill. In that remarkable case of the stigmata, which so admirably supplied the sons of St. Dominick with exactly what they needed, to enable them to hold their own against the rival Order of the Stigmatised St. Francis, how readily may be conceived the sort of conversation and suggestions, which must have prepared the mind of Catherine to reproduce the miracle for them as soon as her infirmity should set free her imagination from the world of reality! And this capability of being played upon, rendered her, it is to be observed, a far more valuable instrument in the hands of those who touched the keys than if she had been a mere accomplice of imposture. Such an every-day cheat would hardly have accomplished the feats, and held the position, which are the most remarkable facts in this strange story, and which present an enigma, that requires some examination in the closing chapter of it. CHAPTER VIII. THE SECRET OF HER INFLUENCE.