ich go to neutralize the
discomfort of being engaged.

WOMAN IN ORDERS.

There is, no doubt, something extremely flattering to our insular
conceit in the mystery which hangs about the institutions which we prize
as specially national. We feel that a Briton is still equal to three
Frenchmen, so long as the three Frenchmen confess with a shrug that the
Briton is wholly unintelligible. The blunders of Dr. Doellinger, the
baffled wonderment with which every foreigner retires from the study of
it, only endear to us the more the Church of England. This was perhaps
the reason, besides the inherent marvel of the matter, why we passed so
lightly over M. Esquiroz and his late ecclesiastical researches. It was
humiliating to English pride to have to confess that a Frenchman had
unveiled to the world of Paris the hitherto sacred mysteries of the
perpetual curate and of the tithe rent-charge.

The enemy was clearly at the gates of the central fortress of British
insularism; even an American bishop was tempted to strive to understand
Westminster Abbey; and a dismal rumor prevailed that nothing hindered
the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from revealing the nature and purpose
of their existence but the fact that, after prolonged inquiry, they
found it impossible to understand them themselves. It was time, we felt,
to abandon these mere outposts of the unintelligible to the aggressions
of an impertinent curiosity, and to retire to the citadel. There,
happily, we are safe. Even the unhallowed inquisitiveness of M. Esquiroz
recoils baffled from the parson's wife. Disdainful of all artificial
adjuncts of mystery, to all appearance a woman like other women, packing
her little sick-baskets, balancing the coal-club accounts, teaching in
her Sunday-school, the centre of religion, of charity, and of
tittle-tattle, woman in orders fronts calmly the inquirer, a being
fearfully and wonderfully English, unknowable and unknown.

No one who saw for the first time the calm, colorless serenity of the
parson's wife would discover in her existence the result of a life-long
disappointment. But the parson on whose arm she leans commonly
represents to his spouse simply the descent from the ideal to the real,
the step from the sublime to the prosaic, if not the ridiculous. There
was a moment in her life when the vestry-door closed upon a world of
hallowed wonder, when the being who appeared in white robes, "mystic,
wonderful," was a being not as ot