how a true saint despised clean
sheets.

In the life of St. Francis we find, among other grotesque miracles, 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
in the universe. A grasshopper remained a week with St. Francis during
the absence of the Virgin Mary, and pittered on his head. He grew so
companionable with a nightingale, that when a nest of swallows began to
babble, he hushed them by desiring them not to tittle-tattle of their
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 in a window some money collected at the altar, he desired
him to take it in his mouth, and throw it on the dung of an ass! St.
Philip Nerius was such a _lover of poverty_, that he frequently prayed
that God would bring him to that state as to stand in need of a penny,
and find nobody 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. A circumstance which seems to have reached Moliere, who gives
this stroke to the character of his Tartuffe:--

Il s'impute a peche la moindre bagatelle;
Jusques-la qu'il se vint, l'autre jour, s'accuser
D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere,
Et de l'avoir tuee avec trop de colere!

I give a miraculous incident 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