n one occasion,
after hearing of the hermits of the Thebaid, she took it into her
head to retire into the wilderness, and chose for her dwelling one
of the caverns in the sandstone rock which abound in Siena near the
quarter where her father lived. We merely see in this event a sign
of her monastic disposition, and a more than usual aptitude for
realising the ideas presented to her mind. But the old biographers
relate how one celestial vision urged the childish hermit to forsake
the world, and another bade her return to the duties of her home.

To the second kind we may refer the frequent communings with Christ
and with the fathers of the Church, together with the other visions
to which she frequently laid claim: nor must we omit the stigmata
which she believed she had received from Christ. Catherine was
constitutionally inclined to hallucinations. At the age of six,
before it was probable that a child should have laid claim to
spiritual gifts which she did not possess, she burst into loud
weeping because her little brother rudely distracted her attention
from the brilliant forms of saints and angels which she traced among
the clouds. Almost all children of a vivid imagination are apt to
transfer the objects of their fancy to the world without them.
Goethe walked for hours in his enchanted gardens as a boy, and
Alfieri tells us how he saw a company of angels in the choristers at
Asti. Nor did S. Catherine omit any means of cultivating this
faculty, and of preventing her splendid visions from fading away, as
they almost always do, beneath the discipline of intellectual
education and among the distractions of daily life. Believing simply
in their heavenly origin, and receiving no secular training
whatsoever, she walked surrounded by a spiritual world, environed,
as her legend says, by angels. Her habits were calculated to foster
this disposition: it is related that she took but little sleep,
scarcely more than two hours at night, and that too on the bare
ground; she ate nothing but vegetables and the sacred wafer of the
host, entirely abjuring the use of wine and meat. This diet,
combined with frequent fasts and severe ascetic discipline,
depressed her physical forces, and her nervous system was thrown
into a state of the highest exaltation. Thoughts became things, and
ideas were projected from her vivid fancy upon the empty air around
her. It was therefore no wonder that, after spending long hours in
vigils and meditat