Among other grotesque miracles we find, in the life of St. Francis, that he preached a sermon in a desert, but he soon collected an immense audience. The birds shrilly warbled to every sentence, and stretched out their necks, opened their beaks, and when he finished, dispersed with a holy rapture into four companies, to report his sermon to all the birds of the universe. A grasshopper remained a week with St. Francis during the absence of the Virgin Mary, and fastened on his head. He grew so companionable with a nightingale, that when a nest of swallows began to twitter, he hushed them, by desiring them not to tittle tattle of his sister the nightingale. Attacked by a wolf, with only the sign manual of the cross, he held a long dialogue with his rabid assailant, till the wolf, meek as a lap-dog, stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him through towns, and became half a Christian. 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 some money in a window collected at the altar, he observed him to take it in his mouth and throw it on the dung of an ass! St. Phillip Nerius was such an admirer _of poverty_ that he frequently prayed God would bring him to that state as to stand in need of a penny, and find none 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. The following miraculous incident is given 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 her nuns were alarmed at their absence, for no one could give any account of them. On the eve of St. John, a cowherd passing by them, beheld a beautiful child seated on a cushion between this pair of run-away nuns. He hastened to the abbess with news of this stray sheep, who saw this lovely child playfully seated between these nymphs, who, with blushing countenances, enquired if the second bell had already rung? Both parties were equally astonished to find our young devotees had been there since the birth of Christ to that of John the Baptist. The abbess inquired after the child who sat between them: they solemnly declared they saw no child between them, and persisted in their story.”