he land of their fathers, and
applied for the charity of their countrymen. There is something very
affecting in the language of the petition by which our countrywomen in
their calamity sought to excite the sympathy, and obtain the
benevolent aid, of their fellow-Christians at home.

We, the underwritten, and company, having on the 1st of November
last suffered such irreparable losses and damage by the dreadful
earthquake and fire which destroyed this city and other parts of
the kingdom, that we have neither house nor sanctuary left us
wherein to retire; nor even the necessaries of life, it being out
of the power of our friends and benefactors here to relieve us,
they all having undergone the same misfortune and disaster. So
that we see no other means of establishing ourselves than by
applying to the nobility, ladies, and gentlemen of our (p. 030)
dear country, humbly imploring your tender compassion and pious
charity; that, so being assisted and succoured from your
bountiful hands, we may for the present subsist under our
deplorable misfortune, and in time retrieve so much of our losses
as to be able to continue always to pray for the prosperity and
conservation of our benefactors.
Augustus Sulyard, Eliz. Hodgeskin,
Peter Willcock. Frances Huddleston,
Cath. Baldwin,
_Sion House, Lisbon_, Winifred Hill.
_May 25, 1756_.

Through another fifty years, the little band, still keeping up the
succession by novices from England, remained in the land of their
refuge; till, in 1810, nine of them, the majority, it is said, of the
survivors, fled from the horrors of war to their native island; and
their convent, whose founder was Henry, the greatest general of his
age, became the barracks of English soldiers under Wellington, the
greatest general of the present day. On their first return they lived
in a small house in Walworth; and in 1825, the remainder, now advanced
in years and reduced to two or three in number, were still living in
the vicinity of the Potteries in Staffordshire,--the last remnant of
an English convent dissolved in the time of Henry VIII. There are at
this time mulberry-trees growing at Sion House, one of the Duke of
Northumberland's[29] mansions, which are believed, not only (p. 031)
to h