were hastening, or, if there, closed her eyes and ears. She was
accustomed to say that useless actions were sinful, and that when we
denied our bodily senses any gratification of this kind, we were amply
repaid by the progress which we made in the interior life, in the same
manner as pruning renders vines and other fruittrees more productive.
From her early youth, and wherever she went, she had frequent
symbolical visions, which showed her in parables, as it were, the
object of her existence, the means of attaining it, and her future
sufferings, together with the dangers and conflicts which she would
have to go through.

She was in her sixteenth year, when one day, whilst at work in the
fields with her parents and sisters, she heard the bell ringing at the
Convent of the Sisters of the Annunciation, at Coesfeld. This sound so
inflamed her secret desire to become a nun, and had so great an effect
upon her, that she fainted away, and remained ill and weak for a long
time after. When in her eighteenth year she was apprenticed at Coesfeld
to a dressmaker, with whom she passed two years, and then returned to
her parents. She asked to be received at the Convents of the
Augustinians at Borken, of the Trappists at Darfeld, and of the Poor
Clares at Munster; but her poverty, and that of these convents, always
presented an insuperable obstacle to her being received. At the age of
twenty, having saved twenty thalers (about 3l. English), which she had
earned by her sewing, she went with this little sum--a perfect fortune for
a poor peasant-girl--to a pious organist of Coesfeld, whose daughter she
had known when she first lived in the town. Her hope was that, by
learning to play on the organ, she might succeed in obtaining
admittance into a convent. But her irresistible desire to serve the
poor and give them everything she possessed left her no time to learn
music, and before long she had so completely stripped herself of