. She has thus blessed you that your child may be made strong for
the work of the Church. Do you not see a miracle is worked within you to
prove Her goodness? This, no doubt, is an evidence to you of Her wish to
bless you and take you for Her own. I beseech you listen to Her voice,
and come and enter Her fold."

"If you mean the Virgin Mary, mum, I ain't a idolater, beggin' yer
parding," says Mrs. Ginx; "an' tho' I wouldn't for the world offend
them as has been so kind to my child, an' saved it from that deer little
creetur bein' thrown over Wauxhall Bridge--an' Ginx ought to be ashamed
of hisself, so he ought--I ain't Papish, mum, and I ain't dispoged, with
twelve on 'em there at home all Protestant to the back bone, to turn
Papish now, an' so I 'ope an' pray, mum," says Mrs. Ginx, roaring and
crying, "you ain't agoin' to make Papish of my flesh an' blood. O dear!
O dear!"

The Lady Superior shut her ears; she had raised a familiar spirit and
could not lay it. She temporized.

"You know your husband has given the child to us. It will be called the
infant Ambrosius."

"Dear, dear!" sighed Mrs. Ginx, "what a name!"

"We wish him to be kept from any worldly taint, and by-and-by his
saintliness may gain you forgiveness in spite of your heretical
perversity. I cannot permit you to give him unconsecrated milk, and as
we wish to treat you kindly, the holy Father Certificatus has allowed me
to make an arrangement with you, to which you can have no objection--I
mean, that you should let me make the sign of the cross upon your
breasts morning and evening before you suckle your infant. You will
permit me to do that, won't you?"

Conceive of Mrs. Ginx's reply, clothed in choice Westminster English:
it asserted her readiness to cut off her right hand, her feet, to be
hanged, drowned, burned, torn to pieces, in fact to withstand all the
torments ascribed by vulgar tradition to Roman Catholic ingenuity,
and to see her baby "a dead corpse" into the bargain, before she would
submit her Protestant bosom to such an indignity.

"No, mum!" she said; "I couldn't sleep with that on my breast;" and
cried hysterically.

This lower class heretic WAS "brutally refractory." So thought the
Superioress, and so gave Mrs. Ginx notice to come no more. She went home
rather jubilant--she was a martyr.

II.--The Protestant Detectoral Association.

Ginx's baby was now fed on consecrated pap. But his mother was not a
woman to be silent u