Christ appeared to her and gave her His own
heart, there He administered to her the sacrament with His own
hands, there she assumed the robe of poverty, and gave her Lord the
silver cross and took from Him the crown of thorns.

To some of us these legends may appear the flimsiest web of fiction:
to others they may seem quite explicable by the laws of semi-morbid
psychology; but to Catherine herself, her biographers, and her
contemporaries, they were not so. The enthusiastic saint and
reverent people believed firmly in these things; and, after the
lapse of five centuries, her votaries still kiss the floor and steps
on which she trod, still say, 'This was the wall on which she leant
when Christ appeared; this was the corner where she clothed Him,
naked and shivering like a beggar-boy; here He sustained her with
angels' food.'

S. Catherine was one of twenty-five children born in wedlock to
Jacopo and Lapa Benincasa, citizens of Siena. Her father exercised
the trade of dyer and fuller. In the year of her birth, 1347, Siena
reached the climax of its power and splendour. It was then that the
plague of Boccaccio began to rage, which swept off 80,000 citizens,
and interrupted the building of the great Duomo. In the midst of so
large a family, and during these troubled times, Catherine grew
almost unnoticed; but it was not long before she manifested her
peculiar disposition. At six years old she already saw visions and
longed for a monastic life: about the same time she used to collect
her childish companions together and preach to them. As she grew,
her wishes became stronger; she refused the proposals which her
parents made that she should marry, and so vexed them by her
obstinacy that they imposed on her the most servile duties in their
household. These she patiently fulfilled, pursuing at the same time
her own vocation with unwearied ardour. She scarcely slept at all,
and ate no food but vegetables and a little bread, scourged herself,
wore sackcloth, and became emaciated, weak, and half delirious. At
length the firmness of her character and the force of her
hallucinations won the day. Her parents consented to her assuming
the Dominican robe, and at the age of thirteen she entered the
monastic life. From this moment till her death we see in her the
ecstatic, the philanthropist, and the politician combined to a
remarkable degree. For three whole years she never left her cell
except to go to church, maintaining an almost