by our innocent baby! Hardly
did the sacred spinsters forecast what was in store for them when he
should be teething.

But Ginx's Baby was in a religious atmosphere, and that is always
surcharged with electricity. His lot must have been above that of any
other human being if he could long have remained in such a climate
unvisited by thunder. The mother had been permitted to attend at the
Home with the same regularity as the milkman, to discharge her maternal
duties. Then with the rise of the visionary projects just mentioned the
gravest doubts began to agitate the fertile and casuistic mind of the
Lady Superior. The holier her ideal St. Ginx of the future, the more to
be deplored was any heretical taint in the present. Holy mother! Was
it not perhaps eminently perilous to his spiritual purity that an
unbeliever like Mrs. Ginx should bring unconsecrated milk into the
convent to be administered to this suckling of the Church! In her
uneasiness she appealed to Father Certificatus, the conventual
confessor. He gave his opinion in the following letter:--

"DEAR SISTER SUSPICIOSA,

"The very grave question you have put to me has given me
much anxiety. It could not but do so since it occupied, I knew, so
fully your own holy reflections. I pondered it during the night while
I repeated one hundred Aves on my knees, and I think the Blessed Virgin
has vouchsafed her assistance.

"I understood you to say you thought that the physical health of the
infant, so singularly and miraculously thrown upon your care,
required the offices of his heretic mother, and yet that you felt how
inconsistent it was with the noble future we contemplate for him, that
he should receive unorthodox lacteal sustentation. In this you are but
following the usage of the Church in all ages, for She has ever enjoined
the advantage of infusing Her doctrines into Her children with the
mother's milk.

"Three courses only appear to me to be open to us. First, we may try to
work upon the mother's feelings, and on behalf of her child induce her
to avail herself of the inestimable privileges of the Church in which
he is fostered. Secondly, should she repel us--and these lower class
heretics are even brutally refractory--we might at least allure her to
allow us to make with holy water the sign of the Cross upon the natural
reservoirs of infant nourishment each time before she approaches the
infant. This, besides overcoming the immediate difficulty and securing
f