a window in the convent chapel looked into the
sanctuary. Attached to the house was a garden of three or four acres.

The country around the town is a typical Flemish landscape, flat,
fertile, thickly dotted with farm buildings, and highly cultivated.
The people are wholly Catholic. The town is an old one, and in its
time has had some military importance. Our young novices often walked
upon the ramparts which encircled it. In the neighborhood are
structures which were built before the Christian era; quite near by
was one of Caesar's round towers, as well as the deserted ruins of an
ancient city named Leo. Curious old churches and monasteries might
often be seen by the novices on their long walks into the country.
All this antiquity was the more pleasing to the American novices
because in their own land the forests, the rivers, and the
everlasting hills are all that represent the distant past.

Besides twenty novices there were ten or twelve fathers at St. Trond,
who either served the church or went about on missions; and there
were also a number of lay brothers. By nationality the greater
portion of the novices were Belgians and Hollanders, the others being
mostly Germans. The language of the house was French, though Latin
was sometimes used. Of course this was an added difficulty to Brother
Hecker, as he was now called, for he knew practically nothing of that
language, though he had studied it a little. But he attacked it
resolutely and, as one of his companions said, learned it heels over
head. He never feared to make mistakes, nor dreaded a smile at his
expense, and as a consequence was soon able to talk to any one. But
his French was always curious, and when he took his turn at reading
during meals he gave the community some hearty laughs.

All the new-comers were invested with the Redemptorist habit about
three weeks after their arrival, in September, 1845. "You can scarce
imagine the happiness I felt on my arrival here," he writes to his
mother in his first letter home. "For three days my heart was filled
with joy and gladness. I was like one who had been transported to a
lovelier, a purer, and a better world." He tells her that he had
waited for a fortnight before writing, to learn the place, and then,
after expressing his satisfaction with everything in such sentences
as the above, he fills the rest of the letter with arguments in favor
of the Catholic Church and exhortations to join it. Such was the
burden o