ht-seeing for the traveller to
visit their hospital at noonday, when he beholds the Sisters at their
devotions in the chapel. It is a bare, white-walled, cold-looking
chapel, with the usual paraphernalia of pictures and crucifixes. Seated
upon low benches on either side of the aisle were the curious or the
devout; the former in greater number and chiefly Americans, who were now
and then whispered silent by an old pauper zealous for the sanctity
of the place. At the stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by two,
followed by the lady-superior with a prayerbook in her hand. She clapped
the leaves of this together in signal for them to kneel, to rise, to
kneel again and rise, while they repeated in rather harsh voices their
prayers, and then clattered out of the chapel as they had clattered in,
with resounding shoes. The two young girls at the head were very pretty,
and all the pale faces had a corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at their
pensive sameness, it seemed to him that those prettiest girls might
very well be the twain that he had seen here so many years ago, stricken
forever young in their joyless beauty. The ungraceful gowns of coarse
gray, the blue checked aprons, the black crape caps, were the same; they
came and went with the same quick tread, touching their brows with holy
water and kneeling and rising now as then with the same constrained and
ordered movements. Would it be too cruel if they were really the same
persons? or would it be yet more cruel if every year two girls so young
and fair were self-doomed to renew the likeness of that youthful death?

The visitors went about the hospital, and saw the old men and the little
children to whom these good pure lives were given, and they could only
blame the system, not the instruments or their work. Perhaps they did
not judge wisely of the amount of self-sacrifice involved, for they
judged from hearts to which love was the whole of earth and heaven; but
nevertheless they pitied the Gray Nuns amidst the unhomelike comfort
of their convent, the unnatural care of those alien little ones. Poor
'Soeurs Grises' in their narrow cells; at the bedside of sickness and
age and sorrow; kneeling with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the
bloody spectacle of the cross!--the power of your Church is shown far
more subtly and mightily in such as you, than in her grandest fanes or
the sight of her most august ceremonies, with praying priests, swinging
censers, tapers and pi