“Oh, merciful Father in Heaven! what a sight!” cried Salome, overcome with compassionate sorrow.

“Yes, it is piteous! most piteous!” said the mother-superior, in a mournful tone.  “We do the very best we can for these poor, deserted babes; but young infants, bereft of their mother’s milk, which is their life, and of their mother’s tender love and intuitive care, suffer more than any of us can estimate, and are almost sure to perish, out of this life, at least.  With all our care and pains, more than two-thirds of them die.”

“Is there no help for this?” sadly inquired the visitor.

“No help within ourselves.  But the peasant women in our neighborhood have Christian spirits and tender hearts.  When any one among them loses her sucking child, she comes to us and asks for one of our motherless babes.  We select the most needing of them and give it to her, and the nurse child has then a chance for its life; but even then, if it lives, it is because some other child has died and made room for it.”

“Oh, it is piteous! it is piteous, beyond all words to express!  Destitute childhood, destitute old age, are both sorrowful enough, Heaven knows!  But they have power to make their sufferings known, and to ask for help! But destitute infancy! Oh! look here! look here!  Can anything on earth be so pathetic as this?

“They are so innocent; they have not brought their evils on themselves.  They are so helpless!  They have not even words to tell their pain, or ask for relief!  Mother!  You said that I might choose my work!  I have chosen it.  It is here.  And I begin it from this moment,” said Salome.

And she threw off her hat and cloak, and drew her gloves and cast them all on a chair, and went and took up the wailing infant from the cot.

The abbess sat down and watched her.

She soothed the baby’s plaints upon her bosom as she walked it, up and down the floor, singing a sweet, nursery song in a low and tender voice, until it fell asleep.  Then she came and laid it sleeping on its cot.

“My dear daughter,” said the abbess, gravely, “before you select this field of duty, I must warn you that it is, and it must needs be, of all charitable administrations, the most laborious and trying.”

“It may be so; but it is also the most divine,” said Salome, with a grave, sweet smile.  “Listen, dear mother.  I know not how it is, but—­with all its pathos—­the sphere of this room is heavenly.  And while I held that baby to my bosom and soothed it to sleep, its little, soft form seemed to draw all the fever and soreness from my own aching heart as well.  Here is my earthly work, dear mother!  Nay, rather, here is my heavenly mission and consolation.  Leave me here.”

The mother-superior took the votaress at her word, and left her then and there.

In the course of the same day a small closet, communicating with the infants’ dormitory, was fitted up as a sleeping berth for Salome, and her few personal effects were conveyed from the convent and arranged within her new dwelling.