She whose still young life is thus gradually ebbing away, might be now enjoying in her luxurious home all the comforts which wealth can purchase, but because she preferred the poverty of Jesus Christ to the treasures of earth, she is surrounded in lieu of them by unmistakable traces of abject indigence. Her bed of death is formed of one of the narrow wooden shelves which run in tiers all round the small apartment as a substitute for bedsteads, the highest reached by a ladder. Adjoining this common dormitory is the chapel, and as the one serves as a passage to the other, she is perpetually disturbed by the noise of the heavy wooden shoes, which since the conflagration, the whole family have been obliged to adopt for want of leather. Her wearying cough is irritated by the constant smoke of the ill-contrived chimney; her oppressed breathing additionally impeded by the closeness of the overcrowded room; her rest interrupted by the voices of the pupils, the ringing of the bells, the chanting of the Office, and the various other sounds inevitable under existing circumstances. Far from murmuring, she will assure us that she is amused rather than inconvenienced by these unwanted surroundings of a sick room, and that she considers herself specially favoured in the opportunity which her position affords of assisting at the holy Mass, joining in the Office, hearing the sermons, and thus in some manner keeping up to the end the observances of common life. For her final and more entire purification from the dross of earth, her all-merciful Father permitted that she should be afflicted with desolation of soul, such as with all her experience of it, she had never known before. To interior anguish was added the intensity of bodily pain, yet in her sharpest pangs, even when the surgeon's knife gashed her flesh, piercing to the bone, no sound betrayed her agonies, save once, a gentle invocation of the name of Jesus: for this impulse of nature as she considered it, she reproached herself as for a want of patience, and begged pardon as if it were a cause of disedification. Her sufferings reached their height in Holy week, and this coincidence she looked on as a particular privilege, thanking our Lord for thus associating her to His cross. To her visitors, she spoke only of the happiness of heaven, the riches of religious poverty, and the fidelity with which those who have embraced it, should cling to it for ever. "Tell all our friends in France," she said to her Sisters, "that I rejoice in death at having left them for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and assure them that I feel myself infinitely privileged in having been called to this savage land." Our Lord did not permit His faithful servant to die in utter bereavement of spirit. For the three days before her end, she enjoyed a foretaste of paradise; her interior pains vanished; her physical tortures were alleviated. "I know," she said to her director, Father Lalemant, "that