and seems to think itself a very important affair.  And it has a perfect right to its opinion.  We should like to see it in a procession, with Zaccheus, the sacristian, carrying it.  Three fine paintings, which however seem to have lost their colour somewhat, are placed in the particular part of the church we are now at.  The central one represents the “Adoration of the Magi,” and was painted and given by Mr. H. Taylor Bulmer, who formerly resided in Preston.  The second picture to the left is a representation of “Christ’s agony in the Garden;” and the third on the opposite side is “Christ carrying the Cross.”  In front of the altar there is the usual lamp with a crimson spirit flame, burning day and night, and reminding one of the old vestal light, watched by Roman virgins, who were whipped in the dark by a wrathful pontifex if they ever let it go out.  At the northern end of the church there is a large gallery, with one of the neatest artistic designs in front of it we ever saw.  The side walls are surmounted with a chaste frieze, and running towards the base are “stations” and statues of saints.  A small altar within a screen, surmounted with statuary, is placed on each side of the sanctuary, and not far from one of them there is a bright painting which looks well at a distance, but nothing extra two yards off.  It represents Christ preaching out of a boat to some Galileans, amongst whom may be seen the Rev. Canon Walker.  If the painting is correct, the worthy canon has deteriorated none by age, for he seems to look just as like himself now as he did eighteen hundred years since, and to be not a morsel fonder of spectacles and good snuff now than he was then.  His insertion, however, into this picture, was a whim of the artist, whose cosmopolitan theory led him to believe that one man is, as a rule, quite as good as another, and that paintings are always appreciated best when they refer to people whom you know.

There are three of those very terrible places called confessionals at St. Augustine’s, and one day not so long since we visited all of them.  It is enough for an ordinary sinner to patronise one confessional in a week, or a month, or a quarter of a year, and then go home and try to behave himself.  But we went to three in one forenoon with a priest, afterwards had the courage to get into the very centre of a neighbouring building wherein were two and twenty nuns, and then reciprocated compliments with an amiable young lady called the “Mother Superior.”  Terrible places to enter, and most unworldly people to visit, we fancy some of our Protestant friends will say; but we saw nothing very agonising or dreadful—­not even in the confessionals.  Like other folk we had heard grim tales about, such places—­about trap doors, whips, manacles, and all sorts of cruel oddities; but in the confessionals visited we beheld nothing of any of them.  Number one is a very small apartment, perhaps two yards square, with a seat and a couple of sacred pictures in it.  In