m a traitorous Unionist myself."

The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too fine, too
imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions
of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the
stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain
to the further exercise and development of what someone had called "the
starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon England as
her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to
the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. "'T is an
embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave
off till we had canonised nine-tenths of the dead population."

Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest), spoke
up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the beatification of Blessed
Mary. "The official beatification," he discriminated, "for she was
beatified in the heart of every true Catholic Scot on the day when
Bloody Elizabeth murdered her."

And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and
the little Dauphin.

"Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth," laughed the Duchessa, in an aside
to Peter; "here is language to use in the presence of a Protestant
Englishman."

"Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'" said he. "Was n't it a word
of Cardinal Newman's?"

"Yes, I think so," said she. "And since every one is naming his
candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think there never
was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman."

"What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.

Peter pricked up his ears.

"It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England,"
his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other things equal, my
attitude would of course be one of disapproval."

"And yet surely," contended she, "if a pious Catholic girl marries a
Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of converting him?"

"I don't know," said the Cardinal. "Would n't it be safer to let the
conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm afraid, he would
have a hundred chances of inducing her to apostatise, or, at least, of
rendering her lukewarm."

"Not if she had a spark of the true zeal," said Mrs. O'Donovan Florence.
"Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to him, if she will
conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The man wou