of the order of Bethlehem was the
Sister Theresa, the youngest of the band. Youthful as she was, however,
this Sister's heart was no sweet sacrifice of "a flower offered in the
bud;" on the contrary, I am afraid that Sister Theresa had trifled with,
and pinched, and bruised, and trampled the poor budding heart, until she
thought it good for nothing upon earth before she offered it to Heaven.
I fear it was nothing higher than that strange revulsion of feeling,
world-weariness, disappointment, disgust, remorse, fanaticism--either,
any, or all of these, call it what you will, that in past ages and
Catholic countries have filled monasteries with the whilom, gay, worldly
and ambitious; that has sent many a woman in the prime of her beauty and
many a man at the acme of his power into a convent; that transformed the
mighty Emperor Charles V. into a cowled and shrouded monk; the reckless
swashbuckler, Ignatius Loyola, into a holy saint, and the beautiful
Louise de la Valliere into an ascetic nun; which finally metamorphosed
the gayest, maddest, merriest elf that ever danced in the moonlight
into--Sister Theresa.

Poor Jacquelina! for, of course, you can have no doubt that it is of her
we are speaking--she perpetrated her last lugubrious joke on the day
that she was to have made her vows, for when asked what patron saint she
would select by taking that saint's name in religion, she answered--St.
Theresa, because St. Theresa would understand her case the best, having
been, like herself, a scamp and a rattle-brain before she took it into
her head to astonish her friends by becoming a saint. Poor Jacko said
this with the solemnest face and the most serious earnestness; but, with
such a reputation as she had had for pertness, of course nobody would
believe but that she was making fun of the "Blessed Theresa," and so she
was put upon further probation, with the injunction to say the seven
penitential Psalms seven times a day, until she was in a holier frame of
mind; which she did, though under protest that she didn't think the
words composed by David to express his remorse for his own enormous sin
exactly suited her case. Sister Theresa, if the least steady and devout,
was certainly the most active and zealous and courageous among them all.
She yawned horribly over the long litanies and long sermons; but if ever
there was a work of mercy requiring extraordinary labor, privation,
exposure and danger, Sister Theresa was the one to face,