“Ah! your reverence, you do not know what a terrible misfortune has just happened to me not more than half a minute before you knocked at the door.”
“What misfortune can have fallen upon you in so short a time,” I answered.
“Well, please your reverence, open the little box and you will understand me.”
I opened it, but the “good god” was not in it!! Looking in the face of the poor distressed woman, I asked her, “What does this mean? It is empty!”
“It means,” answered she, “that I am the most unfortunate of women! Not more than five minutes after you had left the house, I went to your bed and found that little box. Not knowing what it was, I showed it to my children and to my husband. I asked him to open it, but he refused to do it. I then turned it on every side, trying to guess what it could contain; till the devil tempted me so much that I determined to open it. I came to this corner, where this pale lamp is used to remain on that little shelf, and I opened it. But, O, my God; I do not dare to tell the rest.”
At these words she fell on the floor in a fit of nervous excitement—her cries were piercing, her mouth was foaming. She was cruelly tearing her hair with her own hands. The shrieks and lamentations of the children were so distressing that I could hardly prevent myself from crying also.
After a few moments of the most agonizing anxiety, seeing that the poor woman was becoming calm, I addressed myself to the husband, and said: “Please give me the explanation of these strange things?”
He could hardly speak at first, but as I was very pressing, he told me with a trembling voice: “Please your reverence; look into that vessel that the children use, and you will perhaps understand our desolation! When my wife opened the little silver box, she did not observe the vessel was there, just beneath her hands. In the opening, what was in the silver box fell into that vase, and sank! We were all filled with consternation when you knocked at the door and entered.”
I felt struck with such unspeakable horror at the thought that the body, blood, soul and divinity of my Saviour, Jesus Christ, was there, sunk into that vase, that I remained speechless, and for a long time did not know what to do. At first it came to my mind to plunge my hands into the vase and try to get my Saviour out of that sepulchre of ignominy. But I could not muster courage to do so.
At last I requested the poor desolated family to dig a hole three feet deep in the ground, and deposit it, with its contents, and I left the house, after I had forbidden them from ever saying a word about that awful calamity.