was a man of great native independence of character and
naturally of an extremely sensitive disposition.

Such was the common austerity of the life that it took some ingenuity
to inflict on a novice a mortification which had not grown stale by
use in the case of one or more of the others. But in searching the
interior of the soul the director could find tender places into which
his weapon would be plunged to the bone. But it is more than probable
that he misunderstood Brother Hecker, and that for a time he even
suspected him of being under delusions. For several months, at any
rate, he treated him at his weekly confession with the utmost rigor,
producing indescribable mental agony. Many years afterwards, and when
near his death, Father Hecker once said to the writer: "While I was
kneeling among the novices, outside Pere Othmann's room, waiting to
go to confession, I often begged of God that it might be His will
that I should die before my turn came, so dreadful an ordeal had
confession become on account of the severity of the novice-master."
Yet, as recorded in the memoranda, the victim was eager for the
sacrifice when the knife was not actually lifted over him. "I begged
the novice-master," he said on another occasion, "to watch me
carefully, and when he saw me bent on anything to thwart me. I did
not know any other way of overcoming my nature. He took me at my
word, too. For example, once a week only we had a walk, a good long
one, and we enjoyed it, and it was necessary for us. I enjoyed it
very much indeed. So, sometimes when we were starting out, my
thoughts bounding with the anticipated pleasure, he would stop me
midway on the stairs: 'Frere Hecker,' he would say, 'please remain at
home, and instead of the walk wash and clean the stair-way.' It would
nearly kill me to obey, such was my disappointment, grief,
humiliation."

In conjunction with these trials from without came a recurrence of
resistless interior impulses. "During my novitiate," he is recorded
as saying in 1885, "I found myself under impulses of grace which it
seemed to me impossible to resist. One was to conquer the tendency to
sleep. I slept on boards or on the floor. After a while I was able to
do with five hours sleep, and often with only three, in the
twenty-four. Pere Othmann was not unwilling for me to follow these
impulses as soon as he became convinced of their imperative strength.
Yet I now see that such practices were in a certain sense m