I have enjoyed the exceptional experience of having inspected many convents in Canada, even those of the most strictly cloistered Orders.  By long-established custom, the Governor-General’s wife has the right to inspect any convent in Canada on giving twenty-four hours’ notice, and she may take with her any two persons she chooses, of either sex.  My sister was fond of visiting convents, and she often took me with her as I could speak French.  We have thus been in convents of Ursulines, Poor Clares, Grey Sisters, and in some of those of the more strictly cloistered Orders.  The procedure was always the same.  We were ushered into a beautifully clean, bare, whitewashed parloir, with a highly polished floor redolent of beeswax.  There would be hard benches running round the parloir, raised on a platform, much after the fashion of raised benches in a billiard-room.  In the centre would be a chair for the Reverend Mother.  We then made polite conversation for a few minutes, after which coffee (usually compounded of scorched beans, with no relation whatever to “Coffea Arabica”) was handed to us, and we went over the convent.  It was extremely difficult for two Protestants to find any subject of conversation which could interest a Mother Superior who knew nothing of the world outside her convent walls, nor was it easy to find any common ground on which to meet her, all religious topics being necessarily excluded, I had noticed that the nuns made frequent allusions to a certain Marie Alacoque.  Misled by the similarity of the sound in French, I, in my ignorance, thought that this referred to a method of cooking eggs.  I learnt later that Marie Alacoque was a French nun who lived in the seventeenth century, and I discovered why her memory was so revered by her co-religionists.  It was easy to get a book from the Ottawa Library and to read her up, and after that conversation became less difficult, for a few remarks about Marie Alacoque were always appreciated in conventual circles.  The convents were invariably neat and clean, but I was perpetually struck by the wax-like pallor of the inmates.  The elder nuns in the strictly cloistered Orders were as excited as children over this unexpected irruption into their convent of two strangers from the world outside, which they had left for so long.  They struck me as most excellent, earnest women, and they delighted in exhibiting all their treasures, including the ecclesiastical vestments and their Church plate.  They always made a point of showing us, as an object of great interest, the flat candlestick of bougie that the Cardinal-Archbishop had used when he had last celebrated Pontifical High Mass in their chapel.  In one strictly cloistered convent there was a high wooden trellis across the chapel, so that though the nuns could see the priest at the altar through the trellis-work, he was unable to see them.  In the Convent of the Grey Sisters at Ottawa we found an old English nun who, in spite of having spent thirty-five