e surmounted, but not forgotten themselves. Rather
more than twelve years since, a young girl of eighteen applied to be
admitted to share the dreary life-in-death existence of the Carmelite
sisterhood. She was received for her year of probation: it expired, and
she still held firmly to her first determination. But the nuns, in pity
to her youth, and perhaps mournfully remembering, even in their
life-long seclusion of mind and body, how strong are the ties which bind
together the beings of this world and the things of this world, gave her
more time yet to search her own motives, to look back on what she was
abandoning, to look forward on what she desired to obtain. Mercifully
refusing to grant her her own wishes, they forebore the performance of
the fatal ceremony which irrevocably took her from earth to give her up
only to Heaven, until she had undergone an additional year of
probation. This last solemn period of delay which Christian charity and
sisterly love had piously granted, expired, and found her still
determined to adhere to her resolution. She took the veil; and the
dreary gates of Lanhearne have closed on all that is mortal of her for
ever!

The convent has two burial places. The first is in an ancient recess
within the village church, and was given to the nuns with the
manor-house. Those among them who first expired on English ground, lie
buried here--the Catholic dead have returned to the once Catholic
edifice, where the Protestant living now worship! When the Carmelite
funeral procession entered this place, it entered at the dead of night,
to avoid the chance of any intrusion. But as the nuns have no private
entrance to their burial-vault, and have been by law prohibited from
making one; as they are obliged to pass through the public door of the
church and walk up the nave, they are at the mercy of any stranger who
can gain admittance to the building, and who may be led by idle
curiosity to watch the ceremonies which accompany their midnight service
for the dead. Feeling this, they have of late years abandoned their
burial place, after first carefully boarding it off from all
observation. No inquisitive eyes can now behold, no intruding footsteps
can now approach, the tombs of the nuns of Mawgan.

The second cemetery, which they use at present, is situated in one of
the convent-gardens, and can therefore be secured, whenever they please,
from all observation. A wooden door at one corner of the ancient port