sacrament, than him that governeth heaven and earth, which is all one. Thus as she had always souvenance and mind of Jesu Christ in her good health, so God comforted her and visited her in her infirmity and languor. In the hour of the nativity of Jesu Christ at Christmas, when the angels and the world made feast and sung and enjoyed of little Jesus that was born, all the poor ladies went to matins into their monastery, and left alone their poor mother sore grieved in her malady. Then she began to think on little Jesus, and was sorrowful that she might not be at the service, and praise our Lord, and said in sighing: 'Fair Lord God, I wake here alone.' And anon she began to hear the friars that sang, and S. Francis, and heard well the jubilation, the psalmody, and the great melody of the song, howbeit her bed was not so nigh that the voice of a man ne of a woman might not be heard ne understood if God did it not by his courtesy, or if God had not given to her, above all nature of man, force and power to hear it. On the morning, when the ladies, her daughters, came to her, she said to them: 'Blessed be our Lord Jesu Christ, for when ye left me, he left me not truly; and I say to you that I have heard this night all the service and solemnity that hath been done in the church by S. Francis, through the grace of Jesu Christ.'
At the pains of her death our Lord comforted her always. For she drew out of the holy wounds of Jesu Christ a bitterness, of which her heart, her will, and her thought were full of anguishes, marvellously bitter, and often as she had been drunken of the
