ntiously tried every means for the
restoration of his bodily health. Good books helped him greatly. He
recited his Breviary as he would read a new and interesting book,
underlining here and there, and noting on the margins. But during
most of his time of illness his infirmities made the Divine Office
impossible. Every day he read or had read to him some parts of the
Scriptures in English. "Without the Book of Job," he used to say, "I
would have broken down completely." Lallemant, St. John of the Cross,
St. Teresa, St. Catherine of Genoa, and other authors of a mystical
tendency he frequently used. But next to the Scriptures no book
served him so well during his illness as _Abandonment, or Entire
Surrender to Divine Providence_, a small posthumous treatise of Father
P. J. Caussade, S.J., edited and published by Father H. Ramiere,
S.J., with a strong defence of the author's doctrine by way of
preface. At Father Hecker's suggestion it we translated into English
by Miss Ella McMahon, and has already soothed many hearts in
difficulties of every kind. It is an ingenious compendium of all
spiritual wisdom, but it seemed to Father Hecker that submission to
the Divine Will is taught in its pages as it has never been done
since the time of the Apostles. The little French copy which he used
is thumbed all to pieces. He used it incessantly when in great
trouble of mind and knew it almost by heart. As he read its sentences
or heard them read he would ejaculate, "Ah, how sweet that is!" "Oh,
what a great truth!" "Oh, that is a most consoling doctrine!" just as
a man exhausted with thirst and covered with dust, as he drinks and
bathes at a gushing fountain in the desert, calls out and sighs and
smiles.

Did he not find men here and there in his travels with whom he would
take counsel and who could comfort him? There is little trace of it,
though he never lacked sympathetic friends for his bodily ailments.
In truth he tried to maintain a cheerful exterior, though
occasionally he failed in his attempts to do so. Only once do we find
by his letters and diaries that he opened his mind freely on his
interior difficulties while in Europe, and that was to Cardinal
Deschamps, who gave him, he writes, very great comfort.

No part of his sojourn in the Old World pleased and profited him so
much as his trip up the Nile in the winter of 1873-4.

"In information of most various kinds," he writes, "it has been the
richest four months of my whol