An excerpt from the book “The Glories of Mary”

BY SAINT ALPHONSUS DE LIGUORI

“In the year 1604 there lived in a city of Flanders two young students, who, instead of attending to their studies, gave themselves up to excesses and dissipation. One night, having gone to the house of a woman of ill fame, one of them, named Richard, after some time returned home, but
the other remained. Richard having gone home
was undressing to go to rest, when he remember
ed that he had not recited that day,
as usual,
Borne "Hail Marys." He was oppressed with
sleep and very weary, yet he roftsed himself and
recited them, although
without devotion, and
only half awake. He then went to bed, and having just fallen asleep, he heard a loud knocking
at the door, and immediately after, before he
had time to open it, he saw before him his companion, with a hideous and ghastly appearance.

"Who are you?" he said to him.

"Do you not know me?" answered the other.

"But what has
so changed you? you seem like a demon."

"Alas!"
exclaimed this poor wretch, "I am damned."

"And how is this?"

"Know," he said, "that
when I came out of that infamous house,
a devil
attacked me and strangled me. My body lies
in the middle of the street, and my soul is in hell.
Know that my punishment would also have been
yours, but the blessed Virgin, on account of those
few Hail Marys said in her honor, has saved you.
Happy will it be for you,
if you know how to
avail yourself of this warning, that the mother
of God sends you through me." After these
words he opened his cloak, showed the fire and
serpents that were consuming him, and then
disappeared.

Then the youth, bursting
into a
flood of tears, threw himself with his face on
the ground, to thank Mary,
his deliverer, and
while he was revolving in his mind a change of
life, he hears the matin bell of a neighboring
Franciscan Monastery.

"It is there," he exclaimed, "that God calls me to do penance."
He went immediately to the convent to beg the
fathers to receive him. Knowing how bad his
life had been, they objected. But after he had
related the circumstance which had brought him.
there, weeping bitterly all the while, two of the
fathers went out to search in the street, and actually found there the dead body of his companion, having the marks of strangulation, and black as a coal. Whereupon the young man was received.”

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