nsequent
incapacity for mental effort in ordinary affairs. Once, at least,
during those two eventful years at Wittem, Father Othmann visited the
place, and when he saw Brother Hecker he embraced him and exclaimed,
"O here is the spouse of the Canticles!" His farewell injunction on
parting at St. Trond had been perforce complied with.

It must have taken more than ordinary penetration to perceive
anything but a kind of grandiose folly in Brother Hecker. The impulse
to talk about the conversion of America, to plan it and advocate it,
to proclaim it possible and prove it so, and to philosophize on the
profoundest questions of the human reason, was irrepressible. This he
did with an air of matured conviction and with the impact of
conscious moral authority, but in terms as strikingly eccentric as
the thoughts were lofty and inspiring, and in execrable French, the
declaimer being known as _minus habens_ in his studies and utterly
incapable. All this was the very make-up of folly; and Brother Hecker
was no doubt thought a fool. But how holy a fool he was his superiors
soon discovered. We find the following among the memoranda:

"Pere L'hoir was my superior in the studentate. He was a holy man and
a good friend, but he was surprised at my state of prayer. He asked
me how it could happen that I, a convert of only a few years, should
have a state of prayer he had not attained though in the Church all
his life and striving for perfection. I told him that it was God's
will to set apart some men for a certain work and specially prepare
them for it, and cause them, as He had me, to be brought under the
influence of special Divine graces from boyhood. L'hoir then began to
send anybody with difficulties to me, and God gave me grace to settle
them. Then murmurs arose that he was too much under my influence, and
he was removed from his position over the studies. But afterwards
they replaced him; he was very efficient in his place."

The confidence of his superiors in Brother Hecker was shown by their
causing him to receive tonsure and minor orders at the end of his
first year at Wittem, though he had made no progress whatever in his
studies.

The following notes are found in the memoranda:

"The time in my whole life when I felt I had gained the greatest
victory by self-exertion was when, after weeks of labor, I was able
to recite the _Pater Noster_ in Latin.

"My memory finally failed me in my studies to that degree that at
las