was ever again in battle for the country, for the captivity of the former terminated only with the war, and the latter fades from history from that date until, in 1827, Jane Washington, for seventeen years a widow, presented it as a precious inheritance to the gallant corps of Charleston citizen soldiery, who still guard its folds from dishonor, as they do the name of the knightly paladin which they bear.  The wedding was celebrated soon after the establishment of peace.  Major Majoribanks escaped the carnage of the day, but he lived not to deliver his distinguished prisoner at Charleston.  Sickening on the retreat with the deadly malaria of the Carolina swamps, he died near Black Oak, and his mossy grave may be seen to-day by the roadside, marked by a simple stone and protected from desecration by a wooden paling.  It stands near the gate of Woodboo plantation, which old Stephen Mazyck, the Huguenot, first settled, about twenty-five miles from Eutaw and forty-three from Charleston.  On the banks of the Cooper, amid the lovely scenes of “Magnolia,” Charleston’s city of the dead, there stands a marble shaft enwreathed in the folds of the rattlesnake, the symbol of Revolutionary patriotism, and beneath it rests all that was mortal of William Washington and Jane Elliott his wife.

ROBERT WILSON.

CONVENT LIFE AND WORK.

To those who have had but little opportunity to examine the inner workings of the Catholic Church the subject of the conventual life has always been something of a puzzle.  Of course it has been difficult for them to obtain a personal insight into its details, just as it would be difficult to gain admittance into the mosque of St. Sophia or a Hindu community of religious.  Curiosity, unsatisfied, betakes itself to hearsay, and since those who know most are generally most silent about their knowledge, it is to the gossip of ignorance or prejudice that curiosity looks for an answer.  Distorted views or imaginary descriptions end by being received into the mill of public opinion, and issue thence ground into gospel truth and invested with mysterious (because fictitious) interest.  It is strange that a phase of life which is in constant practice at the present day, often within a stone’s throw of our own doors, and which has personal ramifications in the families of our neighbors and acquaintances, should still be so much of a phenomenon to the public mind.  In England, France, Italy, Germany and America I have been familiarly acquainted with it, have studied its principles and its details under many varying forms, and never found it less interesting because it was not mysterious.  Human, fallible beings are the inhabitants of monasteries either for males or females, with individual peculiarities and different sympathies—­by no means machines, but free and intelligent agents, each with a character as individual as that of separate flowers in a large garden—­full of personality and of human imperfection.