So it will be interesting to work it up and make it readable." As he turned over his papers he was thinking of one Mother Van Valckenissen, in religion Mary Margaret of the Angels, foundress of the Priory of Carmelite Sisters at Oirschot in Dutch Brabant.
This pious lady was the daughter of a noble house, born on the 26th of May, 1605, at Antwerp, during the wars which devastated Flanders, and at the very time when Prince Maurice of Nassau was besieging the town.

As soon as she could read, her parents sent her to school in a convent of Dominican nuns near Brussels.

Her father dying, her mother removed her from that convent and placed her with the White Ursulines of Louvain; then she too died, and at fifteen the girl was an orphan.
Her guardian again removed her to the House of the Carmelite Sisters at Mechlin; but the struggle between the Spaniards and the Flemings came close to the district watered by the Dyle, and Marie Marguerite was once more taken from her convent to find refuge with the canonesses of Nivelles.

Thus her whole childhood was spent in rushing from one convent to another.
She was happy in these retreats, especially with the Carmelites, adopting the hair shirt and submitting to the severest discipline; but now, on coming forth from the most rigid cloistered life, she found herself in the midst of a gay world.

This Chapter of Canonesses, which ought to have inculcated the mystic life, was one of those hybrid institutions not altogether white nor quite black, a cross between profane piety and pious laity.