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 of all of his letters home from both St. Trond and Wittem.  We have ten written from the novitiate.  An exception must be made as to one which describes in detail the daily order of life in the novitiate.  It is addressed to his mother.

He tells her that the first bell rings at half-past four in the morning and the last at half-past nine at night.  The time is divided between various common and private devotional exercises, including Mass, meditations, recitation of the office in common, study of the rule of the order, spiritual conferences, spiritual reading, and the like.  Silence is broken only for an hour after dinner and another hour after