lives in this lay sisterhood of penance.  Every inmate, be she prisoner or penitent, is taught to sew, first by hand, then on the machine:  many on their first entrance are so ignorant that they do not know on which finger to place the thimble, but after a while most are able to do a good day’s work on common shirts and linen articles which the order contracts for with the wholesale shops.  Another source of profit to the house is the laundry, but this is conducted exclusively by the nuns themselves.  They do all the washing of surplices, altar-cloths, etc. for most of the Catholic churches of New York, for the convents and colleges, and for many private families.  The fluting on children’s frocks and the polish on shirts is something wonderful, and the young nun who superintends the concern seemed to be a real enthusiast in the matter.  The nuns’ dormitories, as well as those of the prisoners, are miracles of neatness; the refectories likewise.  There are various immense airy halls where the nuns and girls sit sewing, and where a stranger sees a spectacle new to most people, certainly unexpected by the greater number—­that of an assemblage of ugly faces, each belonging to an unfortunate whose temptations are usually understood to lie originally in her fatal beauty.  Many of them are scarcely fourteen, and if once admitted, the melancholy chance is that they will be here again time after time:  the sentences are seldom long enough to afford room for thought and conversion.  Among the penitents the cases are far more hopeful, but the gentle sisters never forget their kind, conciliatory manner toward all; and unless a perverse demon whispers to their ear that these nuns are their jailers, the poor prisoners see little to remind them that they are not in a voluntarily chosen home.

Nuns are by no means a shiftless, unbusiness-like set of women:  they can look after themselves as well as after the poor and forlorn:  many of them, were they in the world, would be called strong-minded, blue-stockinged women.  At Montreal there is a large establishment of the Sisters of the Congregation de Notre Dame, generally called Congregation Sisters, founded by Margaret Bourgeoys.  They are the great educational sisters of Lower Canada.  They own St. Paul’s Island, some distance above the city:  this is their farm, and one of the nuns, called the sister econome, has to visit it frequently and superintend matters, being the stewardess and committee of ways and means and revenue department combined.  Of course a good horse is desirable for these drives, and their horses being one source of profit, the econome feels that the reputation of the breed ought not to be depreciated by her own “turnout.”  The young men of the town often meet her on the road and try to distance her, but this she will never permit, and her horse, faultlessly groomed and in splendid condition, always comes off the winner in these innocent races.  One day, however, the bishop, having heard