y of the District Visitor. The old gossip and
dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has
gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor,
in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little
human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases
"to be visited this morning."

The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out
in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she
is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a
difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of
the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry,
but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just
endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor
incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess
in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on
the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the
other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of
Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the
priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune;
their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of
poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace.
All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind
is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious
about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But
in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She
hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an
oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something
very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith
that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but
there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the
sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of
statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting
along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the
other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied
their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy
and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happie