or, not only nursed
in the hospitals of Paris, but went far and wide on their errands of
mercy. Scarcely a day passed without an appeal. After the siege of
Arras in 1656, Louise le Gras was implored to send help to those of
the inhabitants who had survived the horrors of the war. Only two
Sisters could be spared to meet the requirements of eight parishes;
dirt, disease and famine reigned supreme; yet one of them, writing to
her Superior to tell her that the other had been obliged to stop
working from sheer exhaustion, says: "I have never heard a word of
complaint from her lips or seen anything in her face but perfect
content."

A little later the Sisters were sent for to nurse the wounded soldiers
in the hospitals of Calais. "My dear daughters," said Vincent, as he
bade them farewell, "be sure that, wherever you go, God will take care
of you."

Only four could be spared, and the soldiers were dying in scores of an
infectious disease. It was at the risk of their lives that the Sisters
went among them, and two out of the four caught the infection and
died. When the news reached Paris, there were numbers eager to take
their place, and the four who were chosen set off rejoicing.

The hospitals all over the country were in need of reform, and in
Paris every new scheme for the relief of the poor called for the
Sisters' assistance. In the hospital at Marseilles they were tending
the convicts; when the home for the aged poor was instituted, it was
under their government; the Foundling Hospital was in their hands.
Wherever there was need for zeal and self-denial, there these devoted
women were to be found, ready to lay down their lives in the service
of their neighbor. They had renounced what pleasures the world might
hold for them for a life of toil and discomfort; their sacrifice was
hidden; they lived and died unnoticed.

"We have no knowledge of our way except that we follow Jesus," writes
the Mother and Foundress of the company, "always working and always
suffering. He could never have led us unless His own resolve had taken
Him as far as death on the Cross."

In 1641 the Sisters of Charity had taken up a fresh work, one which
lay very close to Vincent's heart, the teaching of little children. It
should be, he told them, as much a part of their vocation as the care
of the poor and the sick, and they were to spare no pains to give
these little creatures the solid Christian teaching which nothing can
replace.

As the