that ever a Saint can have addressed to God.

She had so loved the Holy Eucharist, she had so longed to kneel at His
feet and atone for the outrages inflicted on Him by the sins of mankind,
that she waxed faint at the thought that after her death what would
remain of her could no longer worship Him.

The idea that her body would rot in uselessness, that the last handfuls
of her miserable flesh would decay without having served to honour the
Saviour, broke her heart; and then it was that she besought Him to
suffer her to melt away, to liquefy into an oil which might be burnt
before the tabernacle in the lamp of the sanctuary.

And Jesus vouchsafed to her this excessive privilege, such as the like
is unknown in the history of the Saints; and at the moment when she died
she enjoined her daughters to leave her body exposed in the chapel, and
unburied for some weeks.

On this point there is abundant authentic evidence. More or less minute
inquiries were made, and the reports of medical experts are so precise
that we can follow from day to day the state of the corpse until it had
turned to oil and could be preserved in phials, from which, by her
desire, a spoonful was poured every morning to feed the wick of a lamp
hanging near the altar.

When she died--then aged fifty-two, having lived as a nun for
thirty-three years, and fourteen as Superior of Oirschot--her face was
transfigured, and in spite of the cold of a winter when the Scheldt
could be crossed in a carriage, her body remained soft and pliable; but
it swelled. Surgeons examined it and opened it in the presence of
witnesses. They expected to find the stomach filled with water, but
scarcely half a pint was removed, and the body did not collapse.

This autopsy led to the incomprehensible discovery in the gall-bladder
of three nails with black heads, angular and polished, of an unknown
metal; two weighed as much as half a French gold crown, within seven
grains; the third, which was as large as a nutmeg, weighed five grains
more.

The operators then filled up the intestines with tow soaked in wormwood,
and sewed the body up again with a needle and thread. And during and
after these proceedings not only did the dead nun give out no smell of
putrefaction, but, as in her lifetime, she diffused an ineffable and
exquisite perfume.

Nearly three weeks elapsed; boils formed and broke, giving out blood and
water for more than a month; then the skin showed patches of yell