utter change of scene and to
solitude. When it was over he wrote as follows:

"This trip has been in every respect much more to my benefit than my
most sanguine expectations led me to hope. It seems to me almost like
an inspiration, such have been its beneficial effects to my mind and
body. In Nubia there reigned profound silence and repose, and in
lower Egypt, although there is more activity and evidence of modern
life, still it is quiet and tranquil. I feel somewhat like one who
has been in solitude for three or four months."

"My daily regime," he writes to his brother and Mrs. Hecker, from
Italy, "has not changed these two years which I have spent in Europe.
If I rise before nine I feel it the whole day. In the morning I awake
about seven for good, and take a cup of tea with some bread and
butter. I then read; sometimes, not often, I write a note in bed, and
rise about nine or ten. I take a lunch at twelve and dine at six. My
appetite is not much at any time. My sleep, so so. [All through his
illness he went to bed at nine or shortly after.] I feel for the most
part like a man balancing whether he will keep on swimming or go
under the water. Sometimes I take a nap two or three times a day--if
I can get it. There are weeks when I do not and cannot put my pen to
paper. To write a note is a great effort. . . . Though my strength is
so little my mind is not unoccupied, and I keep up some reading."

Just in what way his spiritual difficulties accelerated his bodily
decline it is hard to say, for he was generally extremely reticent as
to his interior life. A few words dropped unawares and at long
intervals, and carefully taken down at the time, give fleeting
glimpses into a soul which was a dark chamber of sorrow, though it
was sometimes peaceful sorrow. To this we can fortunately add some
sentences written in an unusually confidential mood in letters from
Europe. Before his illness he was over-joyful, or so it seemed to
some to whom this trait of his was a temptation. "Why," it was said,
"religion seems to have no penitential side to Father Hecker at all."
From the day of his ordination until his illness began he might have
made the Psalmist's words his own: "There be many that say, Who shall
show us any good? Lord, Thou hast set upon us the light of Thy
countenance, Thou hast put gladness in my heart." But now the light
of that radiant joy had faded away, and the face of God, though as
present as ever before, loomed