Still more deaths, dear Kate. See what Isa writes to me: “My grandfather suffers continually more and more from fearful pain and extreme weakness. His patience and resignation are admirable. We pray together; I read him the _Imitation_; the _Sick Man’s Day_, by Ozanam, which Lizzy has translated for me, since your friendly kindness made me acquainted with Eugénie de Guérin; also a book most effectually consoling, and to which my grandfather listens with tears. We make Novenas. He has received the ‘Bread of the strong,’ and the help of Heaven cannot fail this manly soul, who has passed through life so nobly.” Jenny has lost her sister-in-law――another house disorganized and without its soul. The little nephew is given to the two sisters, who are going to bring him up and educate him; and Jenny, who had a horror of Latin, is going to learn it in order to lessen its difficulties to the pretty darling. Mother St. André is in heaven. It makes my heart bleed to think of the grief of Mother St. Maurice. It is so cruel a sorrow to lose one’s mother, and _such_ a mother――an exceptionally holy soul, friend of the saintly foundress, destined by Providence to such great things; who has known the brightest joys and the most deadly sorrows, seeing her children die after she had given them up to God. What holy joy gladdened her soul on that day when, herself a religious, she beheld her two daughters clothed in the livery of Christ, and her son, her third treasure, the third pearl in her maternal crown, a priest! What a family of chosen ones, and what sorrows! Oh! when this mother, at the same time austere and tender, was called upon to close her children’s eyes, were there not, side by side with the feelings of the Christian and the saint, those also of the wife and mother? Dear Kate, I can understand that a religious loves more deeply than other women. The love of God, sanctifying her affections and rendering them almost divine, communicates to them something of the infinite, which is not broken without indescribable suffering. I am writing to Mother St. Maurice. How much I pray God that He may console her――he, the Comforter above all others, who alone touches our wounds without wounding us still more! René is sending you a volume. The affection of all those who love you would fill many. May all good angels of holy affections protect you, dear Kate! FEBRUARY 26, 1868. Behold me with ashes on my brow――ashes placed there by the great bishop. “_Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris._” But, O my soul! it is but the envelope of flesh and clay which must return to dust. The immaterial being escapes the corruption of the grave; my soul, come from God, must ascend again to him.