"Most strangers bored Francisco. What silly questions! One of the favorites was the one inflicted on small boys everywhere in the world: What are you going to be when you grow up? There were those two stuffy senhoras, for example. 'Do you want to be a carpenter?' 'No, ma’am.' 'Ah, you want to be a soldier, then?' 'No, ma’am.' 'A doctor, isn’t that it?' 'Oh, no!' 'I know what you would like to be - a priest!' 'No.' 'What! To say Mass? To hear confessions? To pray in the church? Isn’t that it?' 'No, senhora. I don’t want to be a padre.' 'Then what do you want to be?' 'I don’t want to be anything.' 'You don’t want to be anything?!' 'No. I want to die and go to heaven.' Francisco had no ambition to go to school with Jacinta and Lucia. What was the use, if he was going to heaven so soon? But he liked to walk with them as far as St. Anthony’s Church in Fátima. He would say: 'You go to school and I will stay here in the church near the hidden Jesus. It isn’t worth the trouble for me to learn to read. I’m leaving soon for heaven. When you come back, call me.' The church was being repaired, and the Sacred Host had been moved from the main altar to a small one, near the entrance. 'And there I found him when I returned,' said Lucia. He used to spend whole days on his knees looking at the tabernacle where his Lord was waiting for someone to come and visit Him. It is likely enough that in this way, without direction, Francisco learned to practice mental prayer. He may well have become a fairly advanced contemplative, he may possibly have had ecstasies. He had learned from the Master Himself. He never paraded his piety, but concealed it, even from Jacinta. One day after school when the girls lost sight of him on the Serra, they found him lying prostrate and motionless behind a stone wall. 'Why don’t you come and pray with us?' 'I’d rather pray alone, to think, and to console Our Lord. He is so sad.' 'Francisco, which do you like better, to console Our Lord or to convert sinners so that their souls won’t go to hell any more?' This was a more profound theological question than Lucia may have realized, but he answered without hesitation: 'I’d rather console Our Lord.' 'Don’t you remember then how sad Our Lady was the last month when she said not to offend Our Lord, because He was much offended already?' 'I want to console Our Lord first and then convert the sinners so that they won’t offend any more.' One day he was missing so long that Jacinta thought he was lost. 'Francisco! Francisco!' No answer. Finally they discovered him, prostrate and motionless, behind a pile of rocks. He hardly stirred even when they shook him, and when he finally got up, he seemed hardly to know where he was. He explained that he had been saying the prayer of the Angel, and then had remained there thinking. 'And didn’t you hear Jacinta calling you?' “No, I heard nothing.” He obtained notable cures and conversions. He could never resist any honest appeal. Just as he had once offered a boy two vintens to release a captive bird, and had run all the way to Aljustrel and back to fetch the money, so now he would spare himself no trouble to free some struggling soul from sin. One day on the way to school Lucia met her sister Teresa, recently married, who had come from Lomba, with a request for prayers. The son of a woman there had been arrested and falsely accused of a grave crime for which he might be exiled for many years. After Teresa had passed along to her mother’s house, Lucia told the others what she had said. Francisco was visibly moved - he said: 'While you two are at school I will stay with the hidden Jesus and ask for this grace.' When school was over the girls found him kneeling before the Santissimo. 'Did you tell Our Lady about that?' asked Lucia. 'Yes, and you can tell your sister that the boy will be home again in a few days.' So it came to pass; and the woman was at Cova da Iria on the thirteenth of the next month, giving thanks for her son’s release."