These heaven-sent caresses were rarely meted out to Jacinta and Francisco, for their parents would not allow anyone to lay their hands on them. But they suffered when they saw me suffering, and many a time tears ran down their cheeks whenever they saw me distressed or humiliated.
One day, Jacinta said to me: “If only my parents were like yours, so that those people would beat me too, then I’d have more sacrifices to offer Our Lord.” However she knew how to make the most of opportunities for mortifying herself. Occasionally also, we were in the habit of offering God the sacrifice of spending nine days or a month without taking a drink. Once we made this sacrifice even in the month of August, when the weather was suffocating.
As we were returning one day from the Cova da Iria where we had been praying our Rosary, we came to a pond beside the road, and Jacinta said to me: “Oh I’m so thirsty, and my head aches so! I’m going to drink a little drop of this water.”
“Not that water,” I answered: “My mother doesn’t want us to drink it, because it is not good for us. We’ll go and ask Maria dos Anjos for some.” (She was a neighbor of ours, who had been recently married and was living near there in a small house).
“No! I don’t want good water. I’d rather drink this, because instead of offering Our Lord our thirst, I could offer Him the sacrifice of drinking this dirty water.” As a matter of fact, this water was filthy. People washed their clothes in it, and the animals came there to drink and waded right into it. That was why my mother warned her children not to drink this water.
At other times, Jacinta would say: “Our Lord must be pleased with our sacrifices, because I am so thirsty, so thirsty! Yet I do not want to take a drink. I want to suffer for love of Him.”
One day, we were sitting in the doorway of my uncle’s house, when we noticed several people approaching. Not having time to do anything else, Francisco and I ran inside to hide under the beds, he in one room and I in another. Jacinta said: “I’m not going to hide. I am going to offer this sacrifice to Our Lord.”
These people came up and talked to her, waiting around quite a long time until I could be found. Finally they went away. I slipped out of my hiding place and asked Jacinta: “What did you answer when they asked if you knew where we were?”
“I said nothing at all. I put my head down, kept my eyes fixed on the ground, and said nothing. I always do that, when I don’t want to tell the truth; and I don’t want to tell a lie either, because lying is a sin.”
She was indeed accustomed to do just this, and it was useless to question her if those who did so obtained no response whatsoever. If escape were at all possible, we normally felt little inclined to offer this kind of sacrifice. Another day, we were sitting in the shade of two fig trees overhanging the road that runs by my cousin’s house. Francisco began to play a little way off. He saw several ladies coming towards us and ran back to warn us. We promptly climbed up the fig trees. In those days, it was the fashion to wear hats with brims as wide as a sieve, and we were sure with such head gear, those people would never catch sight of us up there. As soon as the ladies had gone by, we came down as fast as we could, took to our heels and hid in the cornfield.
This habit we had of making good our escape, whenever possible, was yet another cause for complaint on the part of the parish priest. He bitterly complained of the way we tried to avoid priests in particular. His Reverence was certainly right. It was priests especially who put us through the most rigorous cross-examinations, and then returned to question us all over again. Whenever we found ourselves in the presence of a priest, we prepared to offer to God one of our greatest sacrifices!