The gentle St. Francis waived his claim in favour of the great Reformer of the Carmelite Order:  the child recovered, and so retained her sweet name of Therese.  Sorrow, however, was mixed with the Mother’s joy, when it became necessary to send the babe to a foster-mother in the country.  There the “little rose-bud” grew in beauty, and after some months had gained strength sufficient to allow of her being brought back to Alencon.  Her memory of this short but happy time spent with her sainted Mother in the Rue St. Blaise was extraordinarily vivid.  To-day a tablet on the balcony of No. 42 informs the passers-by that here was born a certain Carmelite, by name, Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.  Fifteen years have gone since the meeting in Heaven of Madame Martin and her Carmelite child, and if the pilgrimage to where the Little Flower first saw the light of day, be not so large as that to the grave where her remains await their glorious resurrection, it may nevertheless be numbered in thousands.  And to the English-speaking pilgrim there is an added pleasure in the fact that her most notable convert, the first minister of the United Free Church of Scotland to enter the True Fold, performs, with his convert wife, the courteous duties of host.

* * * * * *

It will not be amiss to say a brief word here on the brother and sister of Madame Martin.  Her sister—­in religion, Sister Marie Dosithea—­led a life so holy at Le Mans that she was cited by Dom Gueranger, perhaps the most distinguished Benedictine of the nineteenth century, as the model of a perfect nun.  By her own confession, she had never been guilty from earliest childhood of the smallest deliberate fault.  She died on February 24, 1877.  It was in the convent made fragrant by such holiness that her niece Pauline Martin, elder sister and “little mother” of Therese, and for five years her Prioress at the Carmel, received her education.  And if the Little Flower may have imbibed the liturgical spirit from her teachers, the daughters of St. Benedict in Lisieux, so that she could say before her death:  “I do not think it is possible for anyone to have desired more than I to assist properly at choir and to recite perfectly the Divine Office”—­may it not be to the influences from Le Mans that may be traced something of the honey-sweet spirit of St. Francis de Sales which pervades the pages of the Autobiography?

With the brother of Zelie Guerin the reader will make acquaintance in the narrative of Therese.  He was a chemist in Lisieux, and it was there his daughter Jeanne Guerin married Dr. La Neele and his younger child Marie entered the Carmel.  Our foreign missionaries had a warm friend in the uncle of Therese—­for his charities he was made godfather to an African King; and to the Catholic Press—­that home missionary—­he was ever most devoted.  Founder, at Lisieux, of the Nocturnal Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and a zealous member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he was called to his abundant reward on September 28, 1909.  Verily the lamp of faith is not extinct in the land of the Norman.