o convents.

NUNNERIES AND PRISONS.

The Quaker prison of Philadelphia is a paradise compared with such a
place as this. If the reader has ever placed his eye at the keeper's
eye-hole in that prison, he must have seen in many a cell a cheerful
face, and the appearance of as much comfort as is compatible with an
imprisoned condition; for ministering angels have been there--mothers
in Israel, who have torn themselves from their domestic duties for a
little time to minister consolation to the very criminals in prison;
and, now that the prison-door has separated the poor wretch forever
from society, whose laws have been outraged, she, by her kindness and
teaching, has led the convict to look to Heaven with a hope of
forgiveness, and daily to pray for those he has injured, while he reads
in the holy book which she gave him, that a repenting thief accompanied
the Son of God to Paradise.

Let us turn from such an unpoetical scene as this, which that cheerful
prison presents, to the convent of Santa Teresa, the most celebrated of
all the ten or fifteen nunneries now in operation about the city of
Mexico. In a cold, damp, comfortless cell, kneeling upon the pavement,
we may see a delicate woman mechanically repeating her daily-imposed
penance of Latin prayers, before the image of a favorite saint and a
basin of holy water. This self-regulating, automaton praying machine,
as she counts off the number of allotted prayers by the number of beads
upon her rosary, beats into her bosom the sharp edge of an iron cross
that rests within her shirt of sacking-cloth, until, nature and her
task exhausted, she throws herself down upon a wooden bed, so
ingeniously arranged as to make sleep intolerable.[69] This poor victim
of self-inflicted daily torture, half crazed from insufficient food,
and sleep, and clothing, has endured all this misery to accumulate a
stock of good works for the use of less meritorious sinners, besides
the amount necessary to carry herself to heaven; for penance, and not
repentance, is this poor pagan's password for salvation.

The old Quakeress is not a fashionable saint, for she never dreamed of
this huxter business in spiritual affairs. Out of the overflowing
goodness of her heart, she had tried to lighten the miseries of life in
her own humble and quiet way, and found her happiness in seeing all
about her made comfortable. The money that others expended in buying
masses for the repose of their own souls and th