lity for learning, also, and was fond of all books. My mother died
when I was four years old.

"I need not tell how the devout passion increased in me as I grew older.
I passed through all the stages of such development very quickly. My
father believed that I had a true vocation for the Church, and yielding
to my entreaties and to the advice of his friends, who told him that he
could never make a soldier of such a boy, he allowed me to enter a
seminary. I was very happy, and my love of books and my earnest desire
to be a priest continued to increase. I was made a deacon and received
the tonsure. Then I fell ill. It was the will of Heaven, for I never was
ill before that, nor have been since. It was a long illness, a dangerous
fever. Just before that time, while I was in the seminary, my father had
married a second time, a young and very beautiful woman, scarcely two
years older than I. They both took care of me, and she was very kind and
liked me from the first.

"I loved her. That was perhaps an illness also, for I never suffered in
that way again. It was very terrible, for I knew what a great sin it was
to love my father's wife. I never told her that I loved her, and she was
always the same, kind and good. My heart was red-hot iron in my breast,
day and night, and it was very long before I was really well again.
After that, I confessed my sin many times, but I could not feel
repentance for it. My father wondered, and so did she, why I would not
go back to the seminary for the few months that remained to complete my
studies. It would have been better if I had gone back. But I loved her,
and I could not. I could not confess the sin in my heart to the
confessor of the seminary, for whom I had great esteem and who had known
me so long, I was ashamed, and waited, thinking that it would pass. But
I wished to escape.

"I joined myself as a lay brother to a Franciscan mission that was
going to Africa. My father made many objections to this, but I overcame
them. I think he guessed that I loved his wife, and though he loved me,
too, he was glad that I should go away. As for me, I trusted that in the
labours of a distant mission I should forget my love, feel honest
repentance, receive absolution, and be ordained a true priest by a
missionary bishop.

"We were seven who started together upon that mission. After two years I
alone was left alive. One after the other they died of the fever of that
country. We had written for hel