Such was the common austerity of the life that it took some ingenuity to inflict on a novice a mortification which had not grown stale by use in the case of one or more of the others.  But in searching the interior of the soul the director could find tender places into which his weapon would be plunged to the bone.  But it is more than probable that he misunderstood Brother Hecker, and that for a time he even suspected him of being under delusions.  For several months, at any rate, he treated him at his weekly confession with the utmost rigor, producing indescribable mental agony.  Many years afterwards, and when near his death, Father Hecker once said to the writer:  “While I was kneeling among the novices, outside Pere Othmann’s room, waiting to go to confession, I often begged of God that it might be His will that I should die before my turn came, so dreadful an ordeal had confession become on account of the severity of the novice-master.”  Yet, as recorded in the memoranda, the victim was eager for the sacrifice when the knife was not actually lifted over him.  “I begged the novice-master,” he said on another occasion, “to watch me carefully, and when he saw me bent on anything to thwart me.  I did not know any other way of overcoming my nature.  He took me at my word, too.  For example, once a week only we had a walk, a good long one, and we enjoyed it, and it was necessary for us.  I enjoyed it very much indeed.  So, sometimes when we were starting out, my thoughts bounding with the anticipated pleasure, he would stop me midway on the stairs:  ‘Frere Hecker,’ he would say, ’please remain at home, and instead of the walk wash and clean the stair-way.’  It would nearly kill me to obey, such was my disappointment, grief, humiliation.”

In conjunction with these trials from without came a recurrence of resistless interior impulses.  “During my novitiate,” he is recorded as saying in 1885, “I found myself under impulses of grace which it seemed to me impossible to resist.  One was to conquer the tendency to sleep.  I slept on boards or on the floor.  After a while I was able to do with five hours sleep, and often with only three, in the twenty-four.  Pere Othmann was not unwilling for me to follow these impulses as soon as he became convinced of their imperative strength.  Yet I now see that such practices were in a certain sense mistaken.  They necessarily consumed in mortification vitality that I could now use, if I had it, in a more useful way.  Still, how could I help it?”

The end of this period of his humiliations, which was not far from the end of his noviceship, is thus described:  “One day after Communion I was making my half-hour thanksgiving in my room, when Pere Othmann came in and examined me about my form of prayer.  Oh! it was just then that I had reached the passive state of prayer:  I did nothing, Another did everything in my prayer.  From that time, having put me down in the gutter, the novice-master