ds December, my skin having
grown tough and callous from the perpetual irritation, and inured to
the fretting of the sharp hair, my mind once more began to wander
mutinously. To check it again I put off the cilice, and with it all
other undergarments, retaining no more clothing than just the rough
brown monkish habit. Thus I exposed myself to the rigours of the
weather, for it had grown very cold in those heights where I dwelt, and
the snows were creeping nearer adown the mountain-side.

I had seen the green of the valley turn to gold and then to flaming
brown. I had seen the fire perish out of those autumnal tints, and with
the falling of the leaves, a slow, grey, bald decrepitude covering the
world. And to this had now succeeded chill wintry gales that howled and
whistled through the logs of my wretched hut, whilst the western wind
coming down over the frozen zone above cut into me like a knife's edge.

And famished as I was I felt this coldness the more, and daily I grew
leaner until there was little left of my erstwhile lusty vigour, and I
was reduced to a parcel of bones held together in a bag of skin, so that
it almost seemed that I must rattle as I walked.

I suffered, and yet I was glad to suffer, and took a joy in my pain,
thanking God for the grace of permitting me to endure it, since the
greater the discomforts of my body, the more numbed became the pain of
my mind, the more removed from me were the lures of longing with which
Satan still did battle for my soul. In pain itself I seemed to find
the nepenthes that others seek from pain; in suffering was my Lethean
draught that brought the only oblivion that I craved.

I think that in those months my reason wandered a little under all this
strain; and I think to-day that the long ecstasies into which I fell
were largely the result of a feverishness that burned in me as a
consequence of a chill that I had taken.

I would spend long hours upon my knees in prayer and meditation. And
remembering how others in such case as mine had known the great boon and
blessing of heavenly visions, I prayed and hoped for some such sign
of grace, confident in its power to sustain me thereafter against all
possible temptation.

And then, one night, as the year was touching its end, it seemed to me
that my prayer was answered. I do not think that my vision was a dream;
leastways, I do not think that I was asleep when it visited me. I was on
my knees at the time, beside my bed