Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/150

128 one occasion a holy man coming to visit him in his cell found the light too strong for his eyes and shielded them with his hands.

"What is the matter?" said Father Seraphim.

"The light shines from your head, O holy one."

"Do not be afraid," said the Father. "You also are bright as I am or you could not have seen me thus. I see you also a shining one. Thank God that it has been given to miserable Seraphim to see a manifestation of the Holy Spirit."

The Father during his hermitage scooped out of the trunk of a lightning-stricken oak the coffin that should hold his remains when he died, and he pulled it in at the door of his hut, slept in it at night, and prayed beside it by day.

He was an extraordinary ascetic, and yet in the picture that you get of him in his old age, when he relaxed his asceticism, he is distinguished by the warmth of his love and the sweetness of his counsel. The pilgrims who come to him he calls his "joys"; before even the wicked he falls down and he kisses their feet. When he gives his benediction he also gives a handful of that dried black bread, sukaree, with which he fed Mishenka, the bear which he tamed in the woods—Father Seraphim's bread which came down from heaven, the bread of the podvig.

My pilgrim acquaintance took me to the various shrines, and we knelt and kissed the thousand-day stone still standing before the great rough-hewn cross that the saint made, kissed the ikons, crossed