during the fasting time.

If you take them a cake or a loaf of bread, a roll of chocolate bonbons,
a basket of eggs, it is all good for them. They must be absolutely
without food for twenty-four hours before they may ask help from the
outside world; and when they have looked starvation in the face, then
they may ring a bell, which means: "Help us! we are famishing!" Perhaps
you take them nothing eatable, but you place on the edge of the cut
orange, by which you sit, some money, demanding in return their
"cartolini," or little papers.

The barrel turns slowly round, then back again, and you find on the
ledge, where you had laid your lire, a paper of "cartolini." These are
very small, thin, light-printed slips, neatly folded in tiny packets,
three to each packet, which, if you swallow in faith, will cure you of
all disease. After your talk is ended, the barrel turns around once more
and presents its face as of an immovable and impenetrable-looking
barrier. One of the pretty traditions of Rome is, that each sister has
her day, when she throws a flower over the convent wall as a sign to her
watching friends that she is still alive. When she has been gathered to
the majority, the flower is not thrown, and the veil has fallen forever.

Harvard College and the Catholic Theory of Education.

Slowly, but with unmistakable certainty, the logic of the Catholic
teaching regarding true education is forcing itself upon non-Catholic
minds. Day by day some prominent Protestant comes boldly to the front
and declares his belief that education must be based upon religion. One
of the latest accessions to this correct theory is President Eliot, of
Harvard College, who declared at a recent meeting of Boston
schoolteachers that,--

"The great problem is that of combining religions with secular
education. This was no problem sixty or seventy years ago, for
then our people were homogeneous. Now, the population is
heterogeneous. Religious teaching can best be combined with
secular teaching and followed in countries of heterogeneous
population, like Germany, Austria, France and Belgium, where
the government pays for the instruction, and the religious
teachers belonging to different denominations are admitted to
the public schools at fixed times. That is the only way out of
the difficulty.... I see, growing up on every side, parochial
schools--that is, Catholic schools--which take