wearied with the day’s labor.  She also persuaded her husband to send the little girl to tend sheep in the plains, exposed to all extremes of weather.  Injuries and abuse were her only welcome when she returned from her day’s task to her home.  To these injuries she submitted with Christian meekness and patience, and she derived her happiness and consolation from religious faith.  She went every day to church to hear mass, disregarding the distance, the difficulty of the journey, and the danger in which she left her flock.  The neighboring forest was full of wolves, who devoured great numbers from other flocks, but never touched a sheep in that of Germana.  To go to the church she was obliged to cross a little river, which was often flooded, but she passed with dry feet; the waters flowing away from her on either side:  howbeit no one else dared to attempt the passage.  Whenever the signal sounded for the Ave Marie, wherever she might be in conducting her sheep, even if in a ditch, or in mud or mire, she kneeled down and offered her devotions to the Queen of Heaven, nor were her garments wet or soiled.  The little children whom she met in the fields she instructed in the truths of religion.  For the poor she felt the tenderest charity, and robbed herself of her scanty pittance of bread to feed them.  One day her step-mother, suspecting that she was carrying away from the house morsels of bread to be thus distributed, incited her husband to look in her apron; he did so, but found it full of flowers, beautiful but out of season, instead of bread.  This miraculous conversion of bread into flowers formed the subject of one of the paintings exhibited in St. Peter’s at the Beatification.  Industrious, charitable, patient and forgiving, Germana lived a memorable example of piety till she passed from earth in the twenty second year of her age.  The night of her death two holy monks were passing, on a journey, in the neighborhood of her house.  Late at night they saw two celestial virgins robed in white on the road that led to her habitation; a few minutes afterwards they returned leading between them another virgin clad in pure white, and with a crown of flowers on her head.

“Wonders did not cease with her death.  Forty years after this event her body was uncovered, in digging a grave for another person, and found entirely uncorrupted—­nay, the blood flowed from a wound accidentally made in her face.  Great crowds assembled to see the body so miraculously preserved, and it was carefully re-interred within the church.  There it lay in place until the French Revolution, when it was pulled up and cast into a ditch and covered with quick lime and water.  But even this failed to injure the body of the blessed saint.  It was found two years afterward entirely unhurt, and even the grave clothes which surrounded it were entire, as on the day of sepulture, two hundred years before.