In 1817 her aged mother came from the country to die by her side.  Anne Catherine showed her all the love she could by comforting and praying for her, and closing her eyes with her own hands—­those hands marked with the stigmas on the 13th of March of the same year.  The inheritance left to Anne Catherine by her mother was more than sufficient for one so imbued with the spirit of mortification and sufferings; and in her turn she left it unimpaired to her friends.  It consisted of these three sayings:- ’Lord, thy will, not mine, be done; ’ ‘Lord, give me patience, and then strike hard;’ ’Those things which are not good to put in the pot are at least good to put beneath it.’  The meaning of this last proverb was:  If things are not fit to be eaten, they may at least be burned, in order that food may be cooked; this suffering does not nourish my heart, but by bearing it patiently, I may at least increase the fire of divine love, by which alone life can profit us anything.  She often repeated these proverbs, and then thought of her mother with gratitude.  Her father had died some little time before.

The writer of these pages became acquainted with her state first through reading a copy of that letter of Stolberg, to which we have already alluded, and afterwards through conversation with a friend who had passed several weeks with her.  In September 1818 he was invited by Bishop Sailer to meet him at the Count de Stolberg’s, in Westphalia; and he went in the first place to Sondermuhlen to see the count, who introduced him to Overberg, from whom he received a letter addressed to Anne Catherine’s doctor.  He paid her his first visit on the 17th of September 1818; and she allowed him to pass several hours by her side each day, until the arrival of Sailer.  From the very beginning, she gave him her confidence to a remarkable extent, and this in the most touching and ingenuous manner.  No doubt she was conscious that by relating without reserve the history of all the trials, joys, and sorrows of her whole life, she was bestowing a most precious spiritual alms upon him.  She treated him with the most generous hospitality, and had no hesitation in doing so, because he did not oppress her and alarm her humility by excessive admiration.  She laid open her interior to him in the same charitable spirit as a pious solitary would in the morning offer the flowers and fruit which had grown in his garden during the night to some way-worn traveller, who, having lost his road in the desert of the world, finds him sitting near his hermitage.  Wholly devoted to her God, she spoke in this open manner as a child would have done, unsuspectingly, with no feelings of mistrust, and with no selfish end in view.  May God reward her!