We have many streets over which wide eaves meet, and within which twilight dwells at noonday.  Some of the hand-wide streets run straight up the cote, and are a succession of steep stairs climbing beside crouching, timber-skeletoned houses perforated by narrow windows opening upon vistas of shadow.  Others seem only to run down from the cote to the sea as steeply as black planks set against a high building.  Upon the very apex of the cote, visible miles away at sea, lives our richest citizen.  His house smiles serenely modern even if only pseudo-classic contempt on all the quaint duskiness and irregularity below, and is pillared, corniced, entablatured, and friezed, with lines severely straight, although the building itself is as round as any mediaeval campanile and surmounted with a Gothic bell-turret, while the entrance-gate is turreted, machicolated, castellated, like the fortress-castles of the Goths.

Lower down the cote, convent walls raise themselves above red-tiled and lichen-grown roofs.  In one of these convents, behind eyeless grim walls, are hidden cloistered nuns; from others the Sisters go freely forth upon errands of both business and mercy.  The convent of cloisters, Couvent des Augustines, is passing rich, and has houses and lands to let.  Once upon a time an Americaine coveted one of these picturesque houses.  She entered the convent and interviewed the business-manager, a veiled nun behind close bars.

“Madame may occupy the house,” said ma Soeur, “by paying five hundred francs a year, by observing every fast and feast of the Church, by attending either matins or vespers every day, and by attending confession and partaking of the holy sacrament every month.”

Madame is a zealous Catholic, therefore the terms, although peculiar, did not seem too severe.  She was about to remove into the house, when, lo! she received word that, it having come to the knowledge of the convent that the husband of Madame was a heretic, he could not be allowed to occupy any tenement of the Communaute.

Although this cloistered sisterhood is vowed to perpetual seclusion, once a year even heretics may gaze upon their pale faces.  This annual occasion is the prize-day of the school they teach, when the school-room is decorated with white cloth and paper roses, the cures of neighboring parishes and the Maire of our ville, with invited distinguished guests, occupy the platform, and the floor below is free to everybody furnished with invitation-cards.

I had always longed to enter these prison-like walls and gaze from my tempestuous distance upon those peaceful lives set apart from earth’s rush and turmoil in a fair and blessed haven of the Lord.  I longed to see those pure visionaries, pale spouses of Christ, and read upon illumined faces the unspeakable rapture of mystic union with the Lamb of God.

Monsieur le Docteur S——­, our family physician, is also physician of the convent.