oftest whispers. Within the low rail, their faces fronting
the altar, and their backs turned on the audience, sat a row of
spectres. Start not, reader; spectres they were,--fleshless, bloodless
spectres. I saw them enter: they came like the sheeted dead; they wore
long white dresses; their faces were pale and livid, like those that
look out upon you from coffins; their forms were thin and wasted, and
cast scarce a shadow as they passed between you and the beams of the
sinking sun. Their eyes they lifted not, but kept them steadfastly fixed
on the ground, over which they crept noiselessly as shadows creep. They
sat mute and moveless, as if they had been statues of cold marble, all
the while these brilliant notes were rolling above them. But I observed
they were closely watched by the priests. There were several beside the
altar; and whichever it was who happened for the moment to be
disengaged, he turned round, and stood regarding the nuns with that
stern anxious look with which one seeks to control a mastiff or a
maniac. Were the priests afraid that, if withdrawn for a moment from the
influence of their eye, a wail of woe would burst forth from these poor
creatures? The last hallelujah had been pealed forth,--the shades of eve
were thickening among the aisles,--when the priests gave the signal to
the nuns. They rose, they moved; and, with eyes which were not lifted
for a moment from the floor on which they trod, they disappeared by the
same private door by which they had entered. I have seen gangs of galley
slaves,--I have seen the husbands and sons of Rome led away manacled
into banishment,--I have seen men standing beneath the gallows; but
never did I see so woe-struck a group as this. Than have gone back with
these nuns to their "paradise," as it is cruelly termed, I felt that I
would rather have lain, where the lost nun is, in the Tiber.

Before visiting Italy, I had read and studied the lectures of Father
Perrone, Professor of Dogmatic Theology in the Collegio Romano, and had
had frequent occasion to mention his name in my own humble pages; for I
had nowhere found so clear a statement of the views held by the Church
of Rome on the important doctrine of Original Sin, as that given in the
Father's writings, and few had spoken so plainly as he had done on the
wickedness of toleration. Being in Rome, I was naturally desirous of
seeing the Father, and hearing him prelect. Accompanied by a young Roman
student, whose acqua