This same St. Francis had such a detestation of the good things of this world, that he would never suffer his followers to touch money. A friar having placed in a window some money collected at the altar, he desired him to take it in his mouth, and throw it on the dung of an ass! St. Philip Nerius was such a _lover of poverty_, that he frequently prayed that God would bring him to that state as to stand in need of a penny, and find nobody that would give him one! But St. Macaire was so shocked at having _killed a louse_, that he endured seven years of penitence among the thorns and briars of a forest. A circumstance which seems to have reached Molière, who gives this stroke to the character of his Tartuffe:-- Il s'impute à péché la moindre bagatelle; Jusques-là qu'il se vint, l'autre jour, s'accuser D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa prière, Et de l'avoir tuée avec trop de colère! I give a miraculous incident respecting two pious maidens. The night of the Nativity of Christ, after the first mass, they both retired into a solitary spot of their nunnery till the second mass was rung. One asked the other, "Why do you want two cushions, when I have only one?" The other replied, "I would place it between us, for the child Jesus; as the Evangelist says, where there are two or three persons assembled I am in the midst of them."--This being done, they sat down, feeling a most lively pleasure at their fancy; and there they remained, from the Nativity of Christ to that of John the Baptist; but this great interval of time passed with these saintly maidens as two hours would appear to others. The abbess and nuns were alarmed at their absence, for no one could give any account of them. In the eve of St. John, a cowherd, passing by them, beheld a beautiful child seated on a cushion between this pair of runaway nuns. He hastened to the abbess with news of these stray sheep; she came and beheld this lovely child playfully seated between these nymphs; they, with blushing countenances, inquired if the second bell had already rung? Both parties were equally astonished to find our young devotees had been there from the Nativity of Jesus to that of St. John. The abbess inquired about the child who sat between them; they solemnly declared they saw no child between them! and persisted in their story! Such is one of these miracles of "the Golden Legend," which a wicked wit might comment on, and see nothing extraordinary in the whole story. The two nuns might be missing between the Nativities, and be found at last with a child seated between them.--They might not choose to account either for their absence or their child--the only touch of miracle is that, they asseverated, they _saw no child_--that I confess is a _little (child) too much_.