tree or flower, and surrounded by the open windows of
dormitories. Over the threshold we had just crossed the nuns pass but
once after their vows,--pass outward, feet foremost, deaf and unseeing,
to a closer, darker home than even their cloistered one. Some of them
have seen nothing beyond their convent walls for forty years, while one
has here worn away sixty years.

_Sixty years_ without one single glimpse of sweet dawn or fair
sunset, without one single vision of the sea in winter majesty of storm
or summer glory! _Sixty years_ without sound of lisping music
running through tall grass, without one single whisper of the aeolian
pines, or glimpse of blooming orchards against pure skies! _Sixty
years_!

Beside me in the school-room sat a buxom peasant-woman, who, as a little
girl crowned with a gaudy tinsel wreath descended from the platform,
confidentially informed me, "_C'est ma fille._ She has taken the
prize for good conduct, and there isn't a worse _coquine_ in our
whole commune."

I saw the pale visionaries, a circle of black-robed figures, with
dead-white bands, like coffin-cerements, across their brows. I saw them
almost unanimously fat, with pendulous jowls and black and broken teeth,
as remote from any expression of mystic fervors and spiritual espousals
as could be well imagined, _"Vieilles commeres_!" grunted my
_paysanne,_ who was evidently neither amiable nor saintly.

Mother Mary-of-the-Angels, once Elise Gautier, was short, fat, and
bustling, with large round-eyed spectacles upon her nose, and the pasty
complexion and premature flaccid wrinkles that come with long seclusion
from sunshine and exercise. She marched about like one who had chosen
Martha's rather than Mary's manner of serving her Lord, and we saw her
chat a full half-hour with the wife of the Maire, bowing, smiling,
gesticulating meantime with all the florid grace of a French woman of
the world.

"The Maire's wife was her former intimate friend," whispered Victoire.
"See how much younger and healthier she looks than the Mother Superior,
and how much happier. _On dit_ that it was chagrin at the marriage
of this friend that caused Elise Gautier to desert her widowed father
and dependent little brothers and sisters to bury herself in a convent."

A more interesting story than Elise Gautier's is told in our ville. Some
years ago a nun left the Couvent des Augustines in open day, passing out
from the central door in her nun's garb, and meet