ount
ten slowly. When I have reached ten, I shall turn on the lights again,
and hey presto! Madame de--'s necklace will be found lying in that
silver bowl!" The room became plunged in darkness, and the Minister
counted slowly up to ten. The electric light blazed out again, there
was no necklace, but the silver bowl had vanished!

I have enjoyed the exceptional experience of having inspected many
convents in Canada, even those of the most strictly cloistered Orders.
By long-established custom, the Governor-General's wife has the right
to inspect any convent in Canada on giving twenty-four hours' notice,
and she may take with her any two persons she chooses, of either sex.
My sister was fond of visiting convents, and she often took me with her
as I could speak French. We have thus been in convents of Ursulines,
Poor Clares, Grey Sisters, and in some of those of the more strictly
cloistered Orders. The procedure was always the same. We were ushered
into a beautifully clean, bare, whitewashed parloir, with a highly
polished floor redolent of beeswax. There would be hard benches running
round the parloir, raised on a platform, much after the fashion of
raised benches in a billiard-room. In the centre would be a chair for
the Reverend Mother. We then made polite conversation for a few
minutes, after which coffee (usually compounded of scorched beans, with
no relation whatever to "Coffea Arabica") was handed to us, and we went
over the convent. It was extremely difficult for two Protestants to
find any subject of conversation which could interest a Mother Superior
who knew nothing of the world outside her convent walls, nor was it
easy to find any common ground on which to meet her, all religious
topics being necessarily excluded, I had noticed that the nuns made
frequent allusions to a certain Marie Alacoque. Misled by the
similarity of the sound in French, I, in my ignorance, thought that
this referred to a method of cooking eggs. I learnt later that Marie
Alacoque was a French nun who lived in the seventeenth century, and I
discovered why her memory was so revered by her co-religionists. It was
easy to get a book from the Ottawa Library and to read her up, and
after that conversation became less difficult, for a few remarks about
Marie Alacoque were always appreciated in conventual circles. The
convents were invariably neat and clean, but I was perpetually struck
by the wax-like pallor of the inmates. The elder nuns in the