sunk lower, so that many a time we found it
hard to hear her--that it fell that she could no longer quit her cell;
and she sent me a bidding to go to her bedside, and with me only two of
us all: to wit my Ann, and Elsa Ebner, a right good child and a diligent
bee in her work.

And it befell that as Sister Margaret on her deathbed bid us farewell for
ever, with many a God speed and much good council for the rest likewise,
her heart waxed soft and she went on to speak of the love each Christian
soul oweth to his neighbor and eke to his enemy. She fixed her eye in
especial on me, and confessed with her pale lips that she herself had
ofttimes found it hard to love evil-minded adversaries and those whose
ways had been contrary to hers, as the law of the Saviour bid her. To
those young ones among us who had made their minds up to take the veil
she had, ere this, more especially shown what was needful; for their way
lay plain before them, to walk as followers of Christ how bitter soever
it might be to their human nature; but we were bound to live in the
world, and she could but counsel us to flee from hate as the soul's worst
foe and the most cunning of all the devils. But an if it should befall
that our heart could not be subdued after a brave struggle to love such
or such an one, then ought we to strive at least to respect all that was
good and praiseworthy in him, inasmuch as we should ever find something
worthy of honor even in the most froward and least pleasing to ourselves.
And these words I have ever kept in mind, and many times have they given
me pause, when the hot blood of the Schoppers has bid me stoop and pick
up a stone to fling at my neighbor.

No longer than three days after she had thus bidden us to her side,
Sister Margaret entered into her rest; she had been our strait but gentle
teacher, and her learning was as far above that of most women of her time
as the heavens are high; and as her mortal body lay, no longer bent, but
at full length in the coffin, the saintly lady, who before she took the
vows had been a Countess of Lupfen, belonged, meseemed, to a race taller
than ours by a head. A calm, queenlike dignity was on her noble thin
face; and, this corpse being the first, as it fell, that I had ever
looked on, it so worked on my mind that death, of which I had heretofore
been in terror, took the image in my young soul of a great Master to whom
we must indeed bow, but who is not our foe.

I never could ea