ng allowed him a
competent maintenance for a year or two. He communicated these his
thoughts to Magdalen. Jasso, his daughter, abbess of the convent of St
Clare de Gandia, famous for the austerity of its rules, and established
by some holy Frenchwomen of that order, whom the calamities of war had
forced to forsake their native country, and to seek a sanctuary in the
kingdom of Valencia.

Magdalen, in her younger days, had been maid of honour and favourite to
the Catholic queen Isabella. The love of solitude, and of the cross, had
caused her to forsake the court of Arragon, and quit for ever the
pleasures of this world. Having chosen the most reformed monastery of
Spain for the place of her retreat, she applied herself, Avith fervour,
to the exercises of penitence and prayer; and became, even from her
noviciate, a perfect pattern of religious perfection.

During the course of her life, she had great communications with God; and
one day he gave her to understand, that she should die a sweet and easy
death; but, on the contrary, one of her nuns was pre-ordained to die in
strange torments. The intention of God was not thereby to reveal to the
abbess what was really to happen, but rather to give her an opportunity
of exercising an heroic act of charity. She comprehended what her
heavenly Father exacted from her, and petitioned him for an exchange.

God granted to her what himself had inspired her to demand; and was
pleased to assure her, by a new revelation, that he had heard her
prayers. She made known to her ghostly father what had passed betwixt God
and her, and time verified it: for the sister above mentioned died
without sickness, and appeared in dying to have had a foretaste of the
joys to come. On the other side, the abbess was struck with a terrible
disease, which took all her body, as it were, in pieces, and made her
suffer intolerable pains; yet even those pains were less cruel to her,
than those inward torments which God at the same time inflicted on her.
She endured all this with wonderful patience and resignation; being well
assured, that in the whole series of these dispensations there was
somewhat of divine.

For what remains concerning her, from the first years of her entry into a
religious life, the gift of prophecy shone so visibly in her, that none
doubted but that she was full of the spirit of God; and 'tis also
probable, that she left a legacy of her prophetic gifts to her spiritual
daughters. For, a