time to expiate, I suffer the most terrible chastisement, and I beseech you not to refuse me the assistance of your prayers." Immediately the good brother prostrated himself before the tabernacle, and recited a Pater, followed by the Requiem AEternam. "Oh, my good Father," cried the apparition, "what refreshment your prayer procures for me! Oh, how it relieves me! I entreat you to continue." Corrado devoutly repeated the same prayers. "Beloved Father," again repeated the soul, " still more! still more! I experience such great relief when you pray." The charitable Religious continued his prayers with renewed fervour, and repeated the Our Father a hundred times. Then, in accents of unspeakable joy, the deceased soul said unto him, " I thank you, my dear Father, in the name of God. I am delivered; behold! I am about to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
We see by the preceding example how efficacious are the smallest prayers, the shortest supplications, to alleviate the sufferings of the poor souls. "I have read," says Father Rossignoli, "that a holy Bishop, rapt in ecstasy, saw a child, who, with a golden fish-hook and a silver thread, drew forth from the bottom of a well a woman who had been drowned therein. After his prayer, and whilst on his way to the church, he saw the same child praying at a grave in the cemetery. ' What are you doing there, my little friend? ' he asked. ' I am saying the Our Father and Hail Mary,' answered the child, 'for the soul of my mother, whose body lies buried here.' The prelate immediately understood that God had wished to show him the efficacy of the most simple prayer; he knew that the soul of that woman had been delivered, that the fish-hook was the Pater, and that the Ave was the silver thread of that mystic line."
