"At one house where he visited, a child was suffering from a bad mouth, so that it was quite distressing to look at it. Father Spencer laid his finger on the child's tongue, and said, 'It will be well;' in a half-an-hour afterwards it was quite well. Once my grandmother was at the point of death; he came and blessed her, and in a day or two she was quite well." Miraculous cures are wrought very frequently by priests' blessings. "Whatever thou blessest shall be blessed," is not pronounced in vain at their ordination; and "we must," as Father Ignatius would say pointedly to those who reflected little on them, "remember that our Lord's words do deserve some little attention." Faith can remove mountains, and it is only proper and just that faith could do something less. Since the faith of the person {242} "made whole" is often as powerful as the faith of the servant of God, each side escapes the vanity of having wrought wonders, by attributing the effect to the other. "He generally went to the kitchen himself, or other places, to get what he wanted, and would often do without a thing, rather than trouble his housekeeper or a servant, if he knew them to be engaged. He wished to be not only his own servant, but the servant of everybody as far as he could. He used to beg of my father and me to pray that he might become poorer than the poorest man we ever knew. He even once asked my father to pray that he might become so poor as to be compelled to _lie down and die in a ditch_. I never saw him out of heart or in the least discouraged, however difficult a case he might come across: he would generally say, 'We must go on, rejoice and thank God; it will all come right in the end.' One of his former high-up friends and he were walking by a lunatic asylum once, and his friend remarked that he should soon be fit for admission there. This he used to relate with as great glee as if he had received a first-rate compliment, perhaps greater. When he visited our house in the country once, he struck his head against a beam somewhere, and I was astonished at hearing him exclaim, 'Served me right.'" Several dear friends die about this time, and the conflict between affection and religious detachment is beautifully pourtrayed in the yielding of the former to the latter by several remarks of his own and others, which we subjoin.