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2 might have recorded, and perhaps many more. He certainly, however, would have overlooked one event, at that time seemingly insignificant, yet really destined to be productive of far-reaching results to the inhabitants of at least one European country. It is this unheeded event of the year 1515—the birth of the tiny Spanish infant, Teresa Sanchez Cepeda d'Avila y Ahumada, together with the remarkable life of which it was the beginning—that most concerns us.

No miracles or marvels are recorded as clustering around the little saint’s cradle, doubtless because Theresa was the seventh child in order of birth, and as such was greeted with no great enthusiasm by any of her kinsfolk. Her father had been twice married, and her own mother, Beatrix de Ahumada, had spent most of her married life as an invalid confined to her sofa. Contemporary writers tell us that this mother was a frail, sensitive, romantic woman, as much given to novel-reading as are the feeble, fashionable women of our own day. Saint Theresa, born of the delicate, imaginative Beatrix, and