seeress eyes, and looking fairly spirit-like for fragility, in her long black dress and white lace shawl. Nothing could well be more piquant than to hear this filmy little thing, in a voice that would have fitted Queen Mab, recount her experiences in the most widely separated circles of life and thought, or quietly give utterance to quaint, audacious speculations, as to mysteries that perplex so many of us concerning this existence and the eternity it preludes. "If there be a hereafter!" I heard some one answer to a remark of hers. "Ah, that was never a doubt to me save for a very brief space," she replied. "I am like the Curé de Ars—'I know some one who would be finely taken in if there were no Paradise!'" Her exquisiteness of look, the fascinating talk, the soft, helpless manner are so appealing that one is disposed to treat her as some wandered denizen of the air and skies, though she hangs effortless, her whole weight upon one, and there is scarce a limit to her fine-lady and delicate-organization requirements.

The daughter of a Low Church dean, she became, in her husband's time, first broad church, then rationalist; after his death, because of extraordinary, extra natural occurrences that befell her, a spiritualist, and now she seems to be turning toward Catholicism, though Miss Hedges, who is a Catholic, shakes her head, and says she always feels very hopeless of people essentially given to all manner of vague interpretations, fanciful twistings of simple doctrine, and æsthetic sentimental mysticism.

"Obedience is in the order of existence," says the little lady. "I long for authority; I long for a voice I shall not question, to whose decision I can submit all the questions that torture me."

"I tried to stay my soul with ritualism," she said, talking to Miss H. and myself when we were alone after dinner, "and at first I thought I was going to get some comfort out of it. I made my father furious by entering one of Miss ——'s famous sisterhoods. But it wouldn't do. Ritualism of course was not more illogical then than now, but the actors weren't as well up in their parts, and how queer some of our performances at —— were! I remember a retreat I made there, in which I was put into a cell bare of everything save a table and chair, and a Testament upon the table, and there I was left alone the whole day, seeing no creature save a Sister who, speechless, thrust my dinner and tea in at me! You may imagine the imbecile condition in which night found me.

"And as a punishment for some fault I was ordered to go to communion for four months without going to confession! Miss ——, our Reverend Mother, behaved exactly as if she had taken her notions of the external character and dignities of her office from some swelling, stern, ridiculous Lady Abbess in a no-popery novel! We undertook everything—teaching, the care of hospitals, training of servants, district work, Magdalen houses, and to these active employments we joined the contemplative, strictly cloistered life! We had no special training for either one of our labors; we had no completed constitutions or rule, and one was liable, at any moment, to be whisked from one's quiet cell and sent alone at night, across the kingdom, to some duty for which one was no more fitted than a baby or a savage.

"I was set, in the beginning, to clean lamps, and black-lead the grates, but failed in this business so completely that I was given a district in East London to afflict with visitations and instructions. Trying one day to convey some idea of the Real Presence to a voluble old woman who was one of the sisterhood's most devoted protégées, I said, 'Then, Sally, since you know who is in the church, I hope you never go in or out without showing proper respect.' 'Oh, yessum, yessum!' she assured me. 'Indeed, 'm, I allays bobs to the eagle!' (the brass eagle of the lectern!). With all Sally's bobbings to the eagle and to us sisters, she was a dreadful old harpy, and made me think always of two old women my father overheard talking one day at Cirencester. There is a fund there which was long ago bequeathed by some pious person for the furnishing small stipends to such aged poor people as should daily devoutly hear mass. Of course since the revenues have lapsed into Anglican hands this sum is used now for those who attend the early service. And this was what my father heard:

"First old crone, loquitur: 'These be hard times, Betty. How d'ye think of getting a livelihood this winter?'

"Second old crone: 'They be hard, for shore, Anne, and I'm a-thinking of taking to yorly priors (early prayers) for a quarter!'

"One of my droll, dreadful district visitor experiences I shall never forget. In the process of my visitations I stumbled, one day, into the room of a woman very haggard and very yellow, but as the woman was dressed and moving actively about, I had no idea of her having any special ailment, save dirt. But as soon as she knew who I was, a visiting Sister, she began to tell me how ill she was—ill of a disease that not another person in the whole kingdom had—the doctor said so—spotted leprosy. And how physicians came constantly to see her, and brought, each one, other physicians—how, in short of a horrible long, she was a sort of gruesome doctor's pet!

"The woman's husband—for she was married, had eleven children, and another baby coming soon—was working away at a cobbler's bench in the room's only window, and she constantly appealed to him: 'Dr. So-and-So said there wasn't another case like mine in this country, didn't he, Jim? And he didn't see how it was it hadn't killed me off long ago—you remember, Jim? And that young Scotch doctor that was so astonished to see what a family I had—you haven't forgotten him, have you, Jim?' And the man corroborated all her statements with a pride in having a wife so uniquely afflicted impossible to describe! Then she insisted I must see and dress the awful sores that made her shoulders and one breast a great wound, telling me, as I half fainted over the task, that I didn't do it half so well as any of the doctors, and begging me, when I had finished, to stop long enough for her to give me a cup of tea in that place, insufferable at best with the dirty cobbler and five or six of the wretched babies, but become, after my mauvais quart d'heure with the terrible woman, a chamber of horrors in which to delay one further instant would, I felt, make me daft, or shudderingly sea-sick, for life!

"I stopped a year and a half in the sisterhood, trying, as I said, to make it do; but either I'm too logical, or have too keen a sense of the ridiculous, for the farce of our active-uncloistered-severely-contemplative-enclosed life, a religious order without a constitution, frowned on by all the bishops, carrying on its dearest devotional practices in hiding from all proper ecclesiastical authority, became intolerable to me; and when, one fine day, there came from 'Reverend Mother' an order to go and nurse a man ill with typhus—an agricultural laborer living alone in his cottage—and to my remonstrances that I knew nothing of the disease, my plea for a companion less ignorant or at least clear instructions for my own guidance, no answer was vouchsafed save an oracular assurance that if I did my part of obedience, light would be given me, I revolted, sent a contumacious message that though I believed the age of miracles by no means past, I had never seen any wrought in our order, and could not risk the poor man's life upon so vague a prospect, and presently bid farewell to my Anglican convent and to ritualism. Several Sisters have returned to the world since, and four of these have gone over to Rome. Two of these have married. One, whom I loved most dearly, is a Poor Clare in Ireland, and the other has used her fortune to open a crèche, where she works harder than any of her nurses, and carries, I should say, the lightest heart in London.

"I have no doubt there is more system, more decorum—I use the word in its literal sense—in the Anglican