Never satisfied with suffering, he devised a new kind of discipline. He fashioned a wooden cross, with thirty nails whose points stood out beyond the wood, and this he wore between his shoulders underneath his garments, till his back was one loathly sore. To the thirty nails he added afterwards seven more, in honour of the sorrows of the Mother of God. When he would administer the discipline, he struck a blow on this cross with his fist, driving the points into his wounded flesh. He made himself, moreover, a scourge, one of the iron tags of which was bent like a fisher’s hook, and with this he lashed himself till it broke in his hand. For many years he lay at nights in a miserable hole he called his cell, with an old door for his bed, and in the depth of winter thought it sin to approach the stove for warmth. His convent lay on a little island where the Rhine flows out of the Lake of Constance. He could see the sparkling water on every side. His wounds filled him with feverish thirst; yet he would often pass the whole day without suffering a drop to moisten his lips. His recompence was the vision in which, at one time, the Holy Child brought him a vessel of spring-water; and, at another, Our Blessed Lady gave him to drink from her own heart. Such, they tell me, was his life till his fortieth year, when it was signified to him that he should remit these terrible exercises. He is now, I believe, little more than fifty years old—the mere wreck of a man to look at; but with such life and energy of spirit that, now he hath begun to live more like other people, he may have a good thirty years before him still.[163] I questioned him about his book called the _Horologe of Wisdom_, or _Book of the Eternal Wisdom_, for it hath gone abroad under both names. He said it was finished in the year 1340, since which time he hath written sundry other pieces. He declared to me that he wrote that treatise only in his most favoured moments, himself ignorant and passive, but under the immediate impulse and illumination of the Divine Wisdom. He afterwards carefully examined all he had written, to be sure that there was nothing in his pages other than the holy Fathers had taught, and the Church received.[164] Methought, if he was sure of his inspiration, he might have spared himself this pain, unless the Holy Spirit could in some sort gainsay his own words.