Thursday, November 28, 2019

The Grapes Of Wrath Essays (1222 words) - U.S. Route 66, Dust Bowl

The Grapes of Wrath The Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck that exposes the desperate conditions under which the migratory farm families of America during the 1930's live under. The novel tells of one families migration west to California through the great economic depression of the 1930's. The Joad family had to abandon their home and their livelihoods. They had to uproot and set adrift because tractors were rapidly industrializing their farms. The bank took possession of their land because the owners could not pay off their loan. The novel shows how the Joad family deals with moving to California. How they survive the cruelty of the land owners that take advantage of them, their poverty and willingness to work. The Grapes of Wrath combines Steinbeck adoration of the land, his simple hatred of corruption resulting from materialism (money) and his abiding faith in the common people to overcome the hostile environment. The novel opens with a retaining picture of nature on rampage. The novel shows the men and women that are unbroken by nature. The theme is one of man verses a hostile environment. His body destroyed but his spirit is not broken. The method used to develop the theme of the novel is through the use of symbolism. There are several uses of symbols in the novel from the turtle at the beginning to the rain at the end. As each symbol is presented through the novel they show examples of the good and the bad things that exist within the novel. The opening chapter paints a vivid picture of the situation facing the drought-stricken farmers of Oklahoma. Dust is described a covering everything, smothering the life out of anything that wants to grow. The dust is symbolic of the erosion of the lives of the people. The dust is synonymous with "deadness". The land is ruined ^way of life (farming) gone, people ^uprooted and forced to leave. Secondly, the dust stands for ^profiteering banks in the background that squeeze the life out the land by forcing the people off the land. The soil, the people (farmers) have been drained of life and are exploited: The last rain fell on the red and gray country of Oklahoma in early May. The weeds became a dark green to protect themselves from the sun's unyielding rays....The wind grew stronger, uprooting the weakened corn, and the air became so filled with dust that the stars were not visible at night. (Chp 1) As the chapter continues a turtle, which appears and reappears several times early in the novel, can be seen to stand for survival, a driving life force in all of mankind that cannot be beaten by nature or man. The turtle represents a hope that the trip to the west is survivable by the farmer migrants (Joad family). The turtle further represents the migrants struggles against nature/man by overcoming every obstacle he encounters: the red ant in his path, the truck driver who tries to run over him, being captured in Tom Joad's jacket: And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. The driver of the truck works for a large company, who try to stop the migrants from going west, when the driver attempts to hit the turtle it is another example of the big powerful guy trying to flatten or kill the little guy. Everything the turtle encounters trys its best to stop the turtle from making its westerly journey. Steadily the turtle advances on, ironically to the southwest, the direction of the mirgration of people. The turtle is described as being lasting, ancient, old and wise: horny head, yellowed toenails, indestructible high dome of a shell, humorous old eyes. (Chp 1) The driver of the truck, red ant and Tom Joad's jacket are all symbolic of nature and man the try to stop the turtle from continuing his journey westward to the promise land. The turtle helps to develop the theme by showing its struggle against life/ comparing it with the Joad struggle against man. The grapes seem to symbolize both bitterness and copiousness. Grandpa the oldest member of the Joad family

Monday, November 25, 2019

Up Style and Down Style

Up Style and Down Style Up Style and Down Style Up Style and Down Style By Maeve Maddox Book titles–and newspaper and magazine headlines–are usually formatted in one of two styles: â€Å"up style† and â€Å"down style.† Up Style This style calls for capitalizing the first and last words in the title or headline and all â€Å"major words† in the title. Not all style guides agree as to what should be considered a major word. Most agree that nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions (if, because, as, that, etc.) are major words and should always be capitalized. That leaves articles (a, an, the), prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor) in the minor league where lowercase prevails. Unfortunately, as is frequent with arbitrary rules, style guides don’t always agree. Both the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook agree that articles (a, an, the), and coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor) should not be capitalized unless they are the first or last word of the title, but when it comes to prepositions, they differ. CMOS says never capitalize a preposition unless it is the first word in the title. AP says leave short prepositions in lowercase, but capitalize prepositions and conjunctions of four or more letters. Here is how the same title would be formatted according to CMOS and AP: CMOS: Four Theories concerning the Gospel according to Matthew AP: Four Theories Concerning the Gospel According to Matthew Most stylebooks state that all verbs are capitalized, including is, am, and be, but that the to of an infinitive is to be treated like a preposition and put in lowercase: How to Train Your Dragon, How to Be a Better Parent. Down Style The only words capitalized in down style are the first word of the title and any proper nouns that appear in the title: Four theories concerning the Gospel according to Matthew. (book title) Coastal Commission enters fray over San Mateo County beach access (headline) Down style has been adopted by many newspapers because it calls for fewer rules. The purpose of having style guides is to make reading pleasant by providing a clear, consistent manner of presenting written material. If you write for yourself, adopt any style you wish for your blog or other publications. If you write for hire, follow your employer’s house style. The following headlines and book titles taken at random from the Web illustrate the fact that not everyone follows the same stylebook: Journey Home Finally Begins for the Victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight (headline, NYTimes) Why Triumphant Jihadis In Iraq Will Help Assad Crush Opposition In Aleppo (headline, HuffPost) Modern Identity Changer: How To Create And Use A New Identity For Privacy And Personal Freedom (book listed on Amazon) Gone With The Wind (AMC filmsite.org) Gone with the Wind (Imdb) Gone With the Wind (Rotten Tomatoes) Hardball: How Politics Is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game  (book listed on Amazon) How To Hide Anything  (book listed on Amazon) Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (book listed on Amazon) I’ll save the question of â€Å"Italics or Quotation Marks?† for another post on book titles. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Style category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Comparative Forms of AdjectivesPeople versus Persons75 Synonyms for â€Å"Hard†

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Personal Trainer's Talents Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Personal Trainer's Talents - Research Paper Example Personal training has different disciplines. Examples are; baby massage instructor, meditation, circuit training, rugby coach and many others. These disciplines of choice require different training facilities. The job outlook of a personal trainer has to it that there is a high probability that job opportunities will be quite conducive as from now to the coming years. Many people have decided to live healthier lifestyles due to different kinds of health problems. Hence, the need for personal trainers has become so adequate in many people’s lives. There has been a noted reduction of school physical education programs hence, personal trainers are needed to keep the physic of the children conditioned and make them live healthy lives. The salary of a personal trainer roughly ranges from a low of $26,000 to a high of $50,000 annually. This is not fixed as some personal trainers earn more. One’s level of education is also related to one’s pay. For example, a diploma holder will earn less compared to a degree holder. The place where one works will also affect one's salary. Franchise health clubs and universities offer the lowest pay estimated at $13 per hour which will rate about $26,000 annually, federal and state government $20 per hour which amounts to $40,000 annually. This includes working in prisons and parks. Private companies offer $25 per hour, which totals up to an estimated $50,000 annually. Lastly, private trainers happen to receive the highest pay of an estimated $50 per hour. This is achieved through working hard enough to get one's own client list. The skills needed for one to be a personal trainer include a good level of physical fitness, an outgoing personality, a good background in fitness activities and good communication skills. In terms of educational requirements, most employers prefer one who is a holder of a bachelor’s degree or certified. One is advised to register in a package that contains coursework in different areas, which are sports nutrition, first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), athletic performance and client fitness assessment. It is important for one to be certified after having completed the training program.

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Media Interpretation about the movie ' V for Vendetta' Essay

Media Interpretation about the movie ' V for Vendetta' - Essay Example ‘Saving Private Ryan’ is a war film. It can also be classified as an action or epic genre since most war films are frequently paired with other genres like action and epics. There are various generic features of this film that show us that it is a war film. War films are characterized by the horrors and heartbreaks that come with war (Ebert, 1998). They allow the actual fighting of the combatants against either humanity or nations to offer the principal plot for the film’s action. The films take a denunciatory methodology toward war (Jeanine, 1998). In the film ‘Saving Private Ryan’, we can conclude that it belongs to a war genre as it was set during the incursion of Normandy during the Second World War. The film is evidenced by a graphic as well as a genuine depiction of warfare. The first twenty seven minutes of the film are so intense and they depict the assault that took place in the beach of Omaha on June 6, 1944. There is also evidence of a squa d of soldiers. It can be said to be an action genre because it encompasses fights and battles. Lastly, it can be said to be an epic genre because as it presents the historical events that took place during the Second World War (Halton, 1998). The film ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was made by Amblin Entertainment Mutual Film Company (Collins, 2008). This television and film production company is based in the United States of America. It was founded by Steven Spielberg who was actually the director of this film. Amblin Entertainment Mutual Film Company works with other media companies such as DreamWorks Studio. It is a coincidence that the principal partner of the DreamWorks Studios happens to be Steven Spielberg (Natale, 1998). DreamWorks Studios has been rated as the most successful and influential in the film industry. This greatly enhanced the marketing of the ‘Saving Private Ryan’ film. The reputation that both Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks Studios have in the film

Monday, November 18, 2019

After CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTSS, the us social movement of the 1960s and Article

After CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTSS, the us social movement of the 1960s and 70s - Article Example The focus gears toward the point that it was through a series of historical incidents and the aggressiveness for change that women’s rights had been recognized and that choices, which had not been available before, is now a part and parcel of a woman’s everyday life in America. The narrative highlighted the typical woman of the 1950s whose duty as a homemaker offers no other viable option except child rearing. The women of that era had the singular choice of getting married and then staying at home to care for her husband and their children. As the man sets out to provide for the family, the wife stays at home and tends to the domestic needs of the family. The book, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan enlightened on the shared emptiness and dissatisfaction that housewives share because of a lack of endeavors. This ignites the kindled spirits of the 1960s which formed the Women’s Liberation and the very foundation of radical feminism (â€Å"Makers: Women Who Make America Part I Awakening†). These notions were further challenged by brave women who had the courage to question societal norms and the view of women as second-class citizens to the 1970s when job options remained limited. In the tennis match dubbed The Battle of the Sexes, between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, the former shattered Riggs’ hubris as a woman beats him in the highly publicized game. As King said herself, â€Å"That night it wasn’t about tennis. It was about history. It was about social change† (â€Å"Makers: Women Who Make America Part II Changing the World†). Similarly, women’s newfound power were shown through the focus on contraceptives, specifically pills, where the power to decide is now lodged with the woman. This is also supported by the Supreme Court Decision in Roe vs. Wade where a decision for abortion within the first trimester of the pregnancy is left to the discretion of the woman and her physician. The interviews of women who were part

Friday, November 15, 2019

Ensuring All Stages Pipelining and Accuracy in PASQUAL

Ensuring All Stages Pipelining and Accuracy in PASQUAL Nachiket D. More Abstract GENOME is term used for genetic material of organism. It is used to encode DNA of organisms, or RNA of various kinds of viruses. Ii contains both coding and non coding parts of DNA/RNA. Now a day’s GENOME is constructed for mostly all animals, viruses, and bacteria’s. These data is mostly used in medical research and as well as to predict disease like cancer, HIV and many more. GENOME is consisting of reads, these reads are very large in amount to manipulate and also to store and maintains. Sequencing machine produce output of short overlapping substrings, these substring are called reads. The sequence assembly reconstructs genome sequence of these reads. These genome sequences are long and continuous. Assembly software for Nest Generation Sequencing (NGS) must be a very accurate, fast and have a less memory consumption. PASQUAL is tool used for faster work of NGS GENOME assembly. For address challenges of NGS assembly, parallel algorithm and compressed data structure are used in PASUQAL. PASQUAL delivers better speed of execution, less memory consumption and better solution quality. Keywords – Parallel algorithm, parallel suffix array construction, high performance bioinformatics, de novo sequence assembly, shared memory parallelism, DNA sequence, genome assembly. Introduction The term â€Å"genome† is used for represent/refer as cellular instruction set. Also it used to refer genetic material of a cell. A genome consist of chromosomes, it can be one or more individual chromosomes. Chromosomes consist of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and for many viruses it consists of ribonucleic acid (RNA). DNA is made from simple unit called nucleotides (nt). Nucleotides having four types namely A, C, G, and T. In sequence start and end are denoted by 5’ and 3’ respectively. Deducing the order of nucleotides from cell and encoding it as a string of letters is called a DNA sequencing process. This process cannot read whole sequence continuously, so it breaks DNA molecules into small part, which is used in chemical reaction as templates to produce short sub-sequences called reads. Major problem is a reconstruct the original genome sequence from reads. For these purpose GENOME assembly algorithms are used. A GENOME assembly uses many automated rounds to improvements, but it inspected and edited by specialists. Assembling reads into a long contiguous sequence is called contigs. The genome sequencing is process of reading sequence of base pairs (bp). Organism genome consists of base pairs, which is derived from two stranded of complementary bases. This is a main part to the study of genomes in bioinformatics. Except Whole – Genome Shotgun (WGS) sequencing machine, no other current sequencing method is capable to read whole sequence in one pass. De novo assembly not uses any reference sequence aids to reconstruction of original sequence, because of these it is used in PASQUAL. We have to generate a large number of reads in a small amount of time, for these purpose we used a Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies. Due to these it greatly reduces the experimental cost per base. It helps to study organism at genome level, to deeply understanding of biological mechanism and genome regulation. Due to sequencing genome rapidly, it helps researchers to study more on evolution of viruses and bacteria. Because, bacteria and viruses can adopt behavior more easily also generate mutation easily at every step of reproduction. Next Generation Sequencings (NGS) Decoding DNA sequences is essential in all branches of biological research. For these purpose scientist uses the capillary electrophoresis (CE) – based Sanger sequencing, scientists able to manifest genetic information for any biological system. Because of these it is adopted by many research laboratories. But it has many limitations like throughout, scalability, speed and resolution to preclude in scientists research study. To overcome from these problem, these is new technology is introduced namely as Nest-Generation Sequencing (NGS), that become a reason for boost in research area in bioinformatics and genomic science. NGS is responsible for major transformation in path of retrieving information biological system, genome and epigenome of species. This gives an important breakthrough in fields like human disease and agriculture research. The principle behind NGS is similar to CE. CE generates small fragments of DNA. These fragments are sequentially identified from each fragment, which is re-synthesized from DNA template. NGS perform similar work in parallel fashion, which is population of millions of reaction rather than single or few DSN fragments. Due to this NGS produces hundreds of gigabases of data in single pass/sequencing run. NGS perform its operation as – a single genomic DNA is firstly fragmented into numbers of small segments, which is also known as library of segments. These segments are uniformly and accurately sequenced in millions of parallel reactions. These strings of bases are called as reads. Then these reads are reassembled by tow technique, first is known reference genome called as scaffold (re-sequencing) and second is without any reference genome (de novo sequencing). The output is set of aligned reads represents entire sequence of each chromosome in the gDNA. Fig. Conceptual Overview of Whole-Genome Sequencing Extracted gDNA. gDNA is fragmented into a library of small segments that are each sequenced in paralllel. Individual sequence reads are reassembled by aligning to a reference genome. The Whole–genome sequence is derived from the consensus of aligned reads. NGS output is increased as a rate that outpaces Moor’s law. A single pass can produce up to one gigabase (Gb) of data, at the time of invention i.e. in 2007. At 2011 it reaches up to terabase (Tb) of data in single pass/sequencing run. i.e. almost 1000Ãâ€" increase in four years. Because of this ability of NGS, researchers can move from idea to full data sets in few hours or days. Using CE technology sequencing of human genome takes a time around 10 years. But using NGS we can generate five human genomes at a single run. So it reduces the cost of genome projects. In NGS we can tune resolution of genome experiments. It is possible to produce more or less data, also it support zoom in particular regions of genome with high resolution or view with low resolution but it is more expansive. To do these researchers can tune coverage generated in experiments. This ability gives number of experimental design advantages. Because of various advantages of NGS has permeated in many areas of study. Using NGS, researchers can develop a broad range of application that transformed study designs and finding new information never before imaginable. PASQUAL PASQUAL can produce large data in assembly process in terms of memory consumption and running time. PASQUAL stands for PArallel SeQUence AssembLer. It uses OpenMP for shared memory parallelism, because of its good working between programmer productivity and performance. PASQUAL uses OLC approach and obtain high quality solutions with combination of tailored algorithms. PASQUAL can handle billions of bases. It uses de novo assembly, because of it does not need any reference to produce original sequence. Algorithm constructs biological sequences in parallel by suffix array, and it is good key for parallel performance and memory optimization. Index stage and string graph construction is used for finding overlaps. Misassembles of genome sequence by PASQUAL is significantly less than ny other assemblers. PASQUAL can handle billion of bases in less time, because it uses pipelined stages and compressed data. It has advantages over SOAPdenovo and k-mer like SOAPdenovo is only a tool having comparable speed and k-mer is restricted to smaller length than 128. Rather than PASQUAL produces less errors compared to any other tool. 4. Literature Survey 4.1 De Novo Genome Sequence Assembly In year 2008 to 2012 these are many sequencing techniques are developed, due to these there is major drop in cast from 1/100000th to 1/100000th of price. De novo algorithm is inherited from the SOAPdenovo2 framework. De novo sequencing involves novel genome; it requires specific assembly of reads (sequencing reads). It requires unique combination of length, depth of reads also it requires flexible paired-end insert size. Unpatrolled raw read makes confident and efficient production and long contig assemblies. De novo sequencing assembly is preferred for study of non-model organisms, because it is cheaper and easier to construct a genome. The reference-based assembly uses mapping on to reference genome, because of these it has inability to account for incidents of structural alteration of mRNA transcript. De novo assembly provides means to discover new and unknown sequence in biological research. Reading of whole sequence at once is limited, de novo methods are irreplaceable. It mostly used to discover new and unknown sequences, which is important in biodiversity in world. 4.2 Overlap/Layout/Consensus (OLC) Approach Overlap Layout Consensus (OLC) method is used in de novo assembly. It has a three steps overlap, layout and consensus respectively. In overlap stage graph is constructed, graph is made up of basic assembly. In layout stage this given graph is compressed. And in the consensus stage upon graph data, genome sequence is determined. These data is generated in previous two stapes. Overlap:- In the overlap stage, each and every reads are compared with every other read, and these is perform in both direction forward and reverse complement orientations. It is very time consuming procedure especially in set of large reads. Layout:- Finding path in OLC graph in not an easy task, because it has million of nodes and edges, and it very tedious task to find path that visit each node exactly ones. In this stage it OLC assembly graph is simplified, where assembly graph (i.e. segments) are compressed into contigs. Consensus:- This is a final stage of OLC approach, at this step assembly graph is reduced to large scaffolds i.e. single scaffold. It start from left most read of each scaffold, OLC algorithm computes consensus of all the reads composing each scaffold. Gaps in the genome may still be presents if the consensus step had insufficient mate-pair or repeat contig information. If an assembly had gaps, it would result in a fragmented genome, composed of multiple scaffolds because the gaps between the scaffolds could not be joined. 4.3 Shotgun Sequencing Sanger DNA sequencing technique work on limited distance in sequencing primer from 30 to 350 nt i.e. read length. Because of chain termination very few product can produce chain. These work at best ability to sequence maybe 500 bases a day and it is infeasible for human genome which have billions of bases. Another approach is, first divide DNA in to smaller fragments which is individually sequenced. Then these fragments are reassembled into original form based on overlaps. This strategy is known as shotgun sequencing, it also known as shotgun cloning. In shotgun sequencing, it randomly sheared into small pieces (usually about 1kb) and sub cloned into universal cloning vector. The library of sub fragments is sampled at random, and sequence reads are generated. These reads are assembled into contig. From this procedure complete sequence of clone generated. Shotgun technique can identify gaps (i.e. there is no sequence available) and single standard regions (where there is sequence for only one stand). They are targeted for additional sequencing to produce fill sequenced module. 5. Full Stage Pipelining and accuracy in PASQUAL 5.1 Motivation for this topic With an explosive growth of genome research area and in genome sequencing data, there is huge demand for tool and systems that enables researchers to more efficiently and more effectively work. NGS technology can produce shorter reads as compared to previous sequencing and delivers higher coverage. Coverage means ratio of total length of reds to genome length. Typically NGS generates reads from millions to few billion. This result is depending upon genome size and coverage. Due to high improvements in technologies, data sets to grow larger. As well as assembly become more demanding in time and memory consumption. 5.2 Selected area In NGS mainly contains DNA and RNA sequencing. I studied research paper for genome sequencing techniques. Genome sequencing techniques changes rapidly and become more and more advance over the period of time. Now a day’s genome sequencing is not used for research area also in treatments of many diseases. I am choosing full stage pipeline and more accuracy in PASQUAL because today many bioinformatics research topics uses genome sequencing, also it used for research topic in biodiversities. I have studied lots of paper where NGS is suggested for genome sequencing. I used full stage pipelining and more accuracy in PASQUAL NGS genome sequencing. 6. Problem statement Purpose of these research work is make full stage pipelining and more accuracy in PASQUAL genome sequencing. 7. Proposed Solution This system is completely new and it has different techniques to make it efficient for genome sequencing. Currently PASQUAL is not offering full all stages pipelining. Also scaffolding and support of paired-end reads uses third-party tools. It has to be improved error correction. Also acceleration in assembly process and reduce memory consumption. 8. Work done till Today Study of different types of feature PASQUAL. Code for different sequence assembler techniques. Study of different sequencing and assembly algorithms. 9. Objectives Applying full stage pipelining in all stages of PASQUAL. Improving error correction Accelerate the assembly process. Reduce memory consumption. 10. References â€Å"PASQUAL: Parallel Techniques for Next Generation Genome Sequence Assembly† by Xing Liu, Student Member, IEEE, Pushkar R. Pande, Henning Meyerhenke, and David A. Bader, Fellow, IEEE. B.H. Bloom, â€Å"Space/Time Trade-Offs in Hash Coding with Allowable Errors,† Comm. ACM, vol. 13, pp. 422-426, 1970. D. Bryant, W. Wong, and T. Mockler, â€Å"QSRA—A Quality-Value Guided de Novo Short Read Assembler,† BMC Bioinformatics, vol. 10, no. 1, p. 69, 2009. J. Butler, I. MacCallum, M. Kleber, I.A. Shlyakhter, M.K. Belmonte, E.S. Lander, C. Nusbaum, and D.B. Jaffe, â€Å"ALLPATHS: De Novo Assembly of hole-Genome Shotgun Microreads,† GenomeResearch, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 810-820, 2008. H. Dinh and S. Rajasekaran, â€Å"A Memory-Efficient Data Structure Representing Exact-Match Overlap Graphs with Application for Next-Generation DNA Assembly,† Bioinformatics, vol. 27, pp. 1901-1907, 2011. J. Dohm, C. Lottaz, T. Borodina, and H. Himmelbauer, â€Å"SHARCGS, A Fast and Highly Accurate Short-Read Assembly Algorithm for de Novo Genomic Sequencing,† Genome Research, vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 1697-1706, 2007. U. Manber and G. Myers, â€Å"Suffix Arrays: A New Method for OnLine String searches,† Proc. First Ann. ACM-SIAM Symp. DiscreteAlgorithms, pp. 319-327, 1990. www.wikipedia.com

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

The story of Saint Catherine Laboure Essay -- social issues

The story of Saint Catherine Laboure Saint Catherine personally worked no miracles, nor did she practice externally heroic charity like other great saints. She sprang from upper middle class parents among the meadows and vineyards of Burgundy, France. Her father was an educated man and an excellent farmer living in the village of Fain-les-Moutiers not far from DiJon. Her sanctity consists in half a century of faithful service as a simple Daughter of Charity. Catherine was born of Peter and Louise Laboure on May 2, 1806. She was the ninth child of a family of eleven. The day after her birth she was baptized on the feast of the Finding of The True Cross. Even the feast of Catherine's baptism was prophetic, because Catherine was to find the cross in every turn of her life, and to have deep devotion for it, and to see a mysterious vision of the cross. When Catherine was nine years old, her saintly mother died. After the burial service, little Catherine went to her room, stood on a chair, took our Lady's statue from the wall, kissed it, and said: "Now, dear Lady, you are to be my mother." On January 25, 1818, Catherine received her First Holy Communion. From that day on she arose every morning at 4:00 a.m., walked several miles to church in order to assist at Mass, and to pray. One day she had a dream in which she saw an old priest say Mass. After Mass, the priest turned and beckoned her with his finger, but she drew backwards, keeping her eye on him. The vision moved to a sick room where she saw the same priest, who said: "My child, it is a good deed to look after the sick; you run away now, but one day you will be glad to come to me. God has designs on you - do not forget it." Later, she awoke, not knowing the significance of the dream. Sometime later, while visiting a hospital of the Daughters of Charity, Catherine noticed a priest's picture on the wall. She asked a sister who he was, and was told: "Our Holy Founder Saint Vincent de Paul." This was the same priest Catherine had seen in the dream. In January of 1830, Catherine Laboure became a postulant in the hospice of the Daughters of Charity at Catillon-sur-Seine. Three months later she was again in Paris, this time to enter the Seminary at the Mother House of the Daughters of Charity. Shortly after she entered her new home, God was pleased to grant her several extraordinary visions. On thr... ...d any praise and promise so she fled from it. She wanted to be left alone to carry out her humble duties as a Daughter of Charity. For over forty years, she spent her every effort in caring for the aged and infirm, not revealing to those about her that she had been the recipient of our Lady's medal. The Sisters with whom she lived held her in the highest esteem, and each one longed to be her companion. In 1876, Catherine felt she would die before the end of the year. Mary Immaculate gave Catherine leave to speak and break the silence of forty-six years. Catherine revealed to her Sister Superior that she was the sister to whom the Blessed Mother appeared. On December31, 1876, Saint Catherine passed on to the hands of Mary, this time, however, in heaven. Today her beautiful remains still lie fresh and serene. When her body was exhumed in 1933 it was found as fresh as the day it was buried. Her incorrupt body is encased in glass beneath the side altar at 140 Rue du Bac, Paris, beneath one of the spots where our Lady appeared to her. In the Chapel of the Apparition you can gaze upon the face and the lips that for forty-six years kept a secret, which has since shaken the world.