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.