iving them the appearance of huge old-fashioned
sugar-sticks. These added to the gaiety of the scene, though it cannot
be supposed that they were of any actual use. The most bewildered
visitor was hardly likely to stray off the red baize or miss his way to
the door in front of him. Within the great entrance-hall were palms and
flowering shrubs in pots or tubs. The mosaic flooring, imported from
Italy, and a source of pride to all the Sisters, shone with much washing
and polishing. The Madonna with the blue eyes and the golden crown,
before which even Bishops crossed themselves, was less in evidence than
usual, for the expected guests were mostly heretics. She stood retired
behind the flower-pots, and veiled her benignity with the leaves of
palms.

Right and left of the hall stretched corridors, whose shining parquet
invited the curious to explore the working-rooms and eating-rooms which
lay beyond. The door of the chapel stood open, and offered a vision
of simpering angels crowding the canvas of the altar-piece, a
justly-admired specimen of German religious art. Before it, dimly
seen, two nuns knelt, types of conventual piety, absorbed in spiritual
contemplation amid the tumult of the world's invasion of their
sanctuary. Another door led to the garden. Here a fountain played into a
great stone basin, and neat gravel walks intersected each other at sharp
angles among flower-beds. The grass which lay around the maze of paths
was sacred as a rule, even from the list slippers of the nuns, but
to-day booths stood on it like stalls at a charity bazaar, hung with
tweeds, blankets, and stockings. A tall Calvary lowered incongruously
over one. An inferior Madonna, deposed from her old station in the
entrance-hall, presided in a weather-beaten blue robe over another.

Beyond the garden, blocked off from it by a white wall, lay the factory
itself, the magnet which was drawing the great of the earth to the
nunnery. Here were the workers, all of them bright young women, smiling
pleasantly and well washed for the occasion. They were dressed in neat
violet petticoats and white blouses, with shawls thrown back from their
heads, a glorified presentment of the Mayo woman's working dress. Here
and there, a touch of realism creditable to the Reverend Mother's talent
for stage management, one sat in bare feet--not, of course, dust or mud
stained, as bare feet are apt to be in Connaught, but clean. The careful
observer of detail might have