"How can a mother's heart feel cold or weary,

Knowing her dearer self safe, happy, warm? How can she feel her road too dark or dreary, Who knows her treasure sheltered from the storm?

"How can she sin? Our hearts may be unheeding,
Our God forgot, our holy saints defied;
But can a mother hear her dead child pleading,
And thrust those little angel hands aside?

"Those little hands stretched down to draw her ever
Nearer to God by mother-love: we all
Are blind and weak, yet surely she can never,
With such a stake in Heaven, fail or fall.

"She knows that when the mighty Angels raise
Chorus in Heaven, one little silver tone
Is hers forever, that one little praise,
One little happy voice, is all her own.

"We may not see her sacred crown of honor,
But all the Angels, flitting to and fro,
Pause, smiling as they pass-they look upon her
As mother of an Angel whom they know;

"One whom they left nestled at Mary's feetThe children's place in Heaven-who softly sings

A little chant to please them, slow and sweet, Or smiling strokes their little folded wings;

"Or gives them her white lilies or her beads

To play with yet, in spite of flower or song, They often lift a wistful look that pleads,

And asks her why their mother stays so long.

"Then our dear Queen makes answer she will call
Her very soon: meanwhile they are beguiled
To wait and listen, while she tells them all
A story of her Jesus as a child.

"Ah, saints in Heaven may pray with earnest will And pity for their weak and erring brothers: Yet there is prayer in Heaven more tender still— The little children pleading for their mothers."

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The tears of "silly nervousness were streaming down Mrs. Rolandson's face again. "O, I have often thought it," she exclaimed. "I have often fancied she prayed for me, my little girl. Then you think so, too, Lucy? But O, you don't believe all the rest-the beads, and the intercession of the saints, and the Queen of Heaven? You weren't praying to that image in there, were you, Lucy? I am sure you don't believe all that."

Lucy gazed at her, half in doubt and half in pity. Was Mrs. Rolandson delirious, she thought, in her simplicity, or was this the way that Protestants generally talked? In either case, however, the same gentle answer could be made, and she made it with soothing gestures and caresses, to still the tumult of her patient's mind.

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'Yes, dearest, all the rest. It is no harm, truly, only you do not understand yet; you are ill. But of course I do not pray to the Madonna's statue there."

"You kneeled to it. You lifted up your hands to it; you kissed its feet. I saw you."

None of this did Lucia appear at all unwilling to acknowledge, but she looked thoughtful. At last she said:

"You kissed my likeness when you saw it; Jaspar told me so. You call me Lucy, and not Lucia. Why, dearest ?"

"You are like her," Mrs. Rolandson sobbed; "you make me think of her. I love your very shadow on the wall."

"Yes," said Lucia, with a long, soft, happy sigh; "yes, that it is. These beads, these pictures, this dear statue, they make me think of her. I love them for her most sweet sake. And she-"

Lucia drew her hands from Mrs. Rolandson's clinging fingers, and folded them reverently upon her bosom; she lifted her eyes, full of that ardent look of love and prayer, away from Mrs. Rolandson's face, upward to God.

"She makes me think of our dear Lord," she said.

For awhile there was silence in the room as though they were in church. Then Mrs. Rolandson spoke timidly, as if for the first time in her life she realized that she was speaking of what, to others, if not to her, were very holy things.

"Why do you think so much of the Madonna ?" she said. "Why do you care for her?"

The look of wonder and pity deepened on Lucia's face. "Dear madam," she said, "before ever I saw you I loved you, because you are Jaspar's mother, but our Blessed Lady is the mother of my Lord."

Mrs. Rolandson asked no more questions then, but she thought much. And like a magnet the ivory

statue in the alcove drew her eyes to it with an ever-increasing power of fascination. How often she had spoken, in prayer-meetings at home, of the necessity laid upon us to love all that the Redeemer loved! Now she watched the holy child in his resting-place upon Mary's breast, and with no effort of her will she dwelt upon those long hours and days and months when his chosen resting-place was there, and his heart beat against her heart, and she was his mother and his home, his food and his support. And vaguely she remembered a certain psalm that spoke of love for the place where God's glory dwelleth, as well as for the God of glory himself.

When Lucia bade her good-night Mrs. Rolandson asked longingly: "Tell me, Lucy, tell me truly, do you love the Madonna ?"

The sweet color flushed into Lucia's face. She answered with a saint's holy words and not her own, but they were spoken from the depths of her full heart, and with the lovelight in her eyes.

"She is my mother," was all she said.

"Before ever I saw you, I loved you, because you are Jaspar's mother, but Our Blessed Lady is the mother of my Lord."

The words haunted Mrs. Rolandson. They impelled her thoughts in one direction constantly. When, on her recovery, she visited picture galleries, she was sure to become so charmed by some Madonna or Holy Family, or Mother of Sorrows, that her attention could with difficulty be drawn to anything else. If she went to beautiful churches, it was certain that she would soon and suddenly be missing, and her companions knew at last where they would always find her, before Our Lady's altar, gazing with hungry eyes at the happiest and holiest of mothers with the Lord of the whole universe resting, a meek and tender infant, on her breast. Sometimes they who sought her saw

her lips moving, but they made no observation to her, though they hoped she prayed. She would have denied it vehemently had they asked her. No, she was only repeating what Lucia had said to her: "Our Blessed Lady is the mother of our Lord. She is my mother."

And presently she began to say more than this-stealing away by herself into church or chapel, though still she protested to herself that she was not praying to the Madonna ; no, indeed, she could never think of such a thing. She was only talking to her, that was all.

"Do you love my little Lucy?" she used to say below her breath. "Are you looking at her now? Do you take good care of her? Surely there can be no harm in supposing that she is with you, and you with her. You must be somewhere, and why not together?"

And then, even the thought of her little Lucy became merged in one more deep and dear, the thought of the love of the child Jesus for his mother, and of her love and care for him.

And musing upon this one day, Jaspar's words came to her mind: "If you believe your Bible, it ought surely to be to you a sign of grace, and a cause for thankfulness that I have yielded myself up wholly, like a little child."

Like a little child? What child? Perfect example for all mankind, he lay before her, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, become, of his own free choice, a helpless babe in Mary's arms.

"Mother of Christ!" Mrs. Rolandson cried, without stopping to consider at all whether she was praying or only talking; "mother of Christ! our Lord loved you. I love you too! You taught him to speak, and he talked to you, and I want to talk to you too. I love you, for he loved you. I love you, for you loved him. It is necessary that I should love you, and I must do it, and I want to do it."

As the commonplace of society has it, Sheil was well born. His mother, Catherine MacCarthy, was a descendant of the Counts MacCarthy, who fled from Ireland during the operation of the penal code, and purchased an estate at Toulouse, in France, where they long resided. His father, Edward Sheil, amassed a fortune in Spain, and invested it near Waterford. Richard was born at Bellevue, the paternal estate, on the 16th of August, 1791. His father's comfortable circumstances enabled the son to profit by the services of a French tutor, a clergyman exiled by the revolution. On the publication of the Peace of Amiens, the abbé returned to his native land, and Sheil was sent to the school at Kensington, England, established by the son of General de Broglie, and patronized chiefly by the families of the French nobility. Sheil, who possessed a faculty for pithy and picturesque description, has left a graphic account of his school life. He speaks of Kensington House as old-fashioned, with many remains of decayed glory; the moment he entered it his ears were filled "with the shrill vociferations of some hundreds of little emigrants, who were engaged in their various amusements, and babbled, screamed, laughed, and shouted in all the velocity of their rapid and joyous language." The Prince de Broglie was a little, slender, and gracefully constructed abbé, with a sloping forehead, on which the few hairs that were left him were nicely arranged, and well powdered and pomatumed." Sheil's companions, notwithstanding that they had found in England a refuge from the revolution, loved English soil no more on that account, and every French victory was welcomed with ecstasies of

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boyish excitement. On one occasion, among the visitors came no less a personage than he who was afterwards Charles X, and when he appeared the boys set up "a shrill shout of beardless loyalty," "Vive le Roi!" The expectant king went down among them, and was sensibly affected on discovering, exiled in childhood, the heirs of many of the foremost families of France, orphaned by the guillotine of the revolution. Sheil's association, on terms of perfect equality, with the flowers of the nobility of the ancien régime, must have tended toward making him aristocratic in social ideas, and a monarchist in politics. He found among these boys, and in the company of such of their relatives as were able to visit them, that elegance of address, the innate refinement, the exquisite sense of honor, the perfect courtesy, and the Christian virtue, which combine to form the ideal of the French gentleman. The affection which the older members of these families expressed for the younger ones also sensibly affected him, accustomed as he was to the colder conduct of the men who spoke his own language. Indeed the French exiles planted, as it were, a little tropical circle in a social zone excessively frigid, and Sheil's ardent nature, Gallic in part, luxuriated in the grateful warmth.

"Old gentlemen," he writes, "the neatness of whose attire was accompanied by indications of indigence, used occasionally to visit at Kensington House. Their elasticity of back, the frequency and gracefulness of their well-regulated bows, and the perpetual smile upon their wrinkled and emaciated faces, showed that they had something to do with the Vieille Cour; and this conjecture

was frequently confirmed by the embrace with which they folded the little marquises and counts whom they came to visit." Sheil saw only the gracious aspect of this melancholy and sympathetic picture. He thought of the French aristocracy only as the pride and the honor of that nation. The revolution, which slew so many distinguished nobles and expelled most of those whose lives it capriciously spared, appeared to him hideous and brutal, while the conviction must have also involuntarily stolen upon him that revolution, in this instance, was synonymous with democracy. His youthful mind was incapable of analyzing the causes which precipitated that catastrophe, or of associating with the crown or the court any measure of responsibility for the awful consequences. Like O'Connell, the hideous facts of the revolution made him a conservative, and thus, in his very childhood, he received the indelible impressions which fitted him to be the liberator's colleague and lieu

tenant.

His tutor at Kensington having been sent to China as a missionary, Sheil was transferred to Stonyhurst, where the Jesuits had established a flourishing school on a portion of an estate purchased from the Duke of Norfolk by a Mr. Weld, who had been educated at St. Omer's, and who offered a foundation to his old masters when the revolutionary tide forced them from the continent. Sheil has drawn several striking portraits of the men with whom he was connected in the later period of his boyhood, and lavishes eulogy upon their personal virtues as well as the esprit de corps which animated them. "At the head of the college was the rector of the English province, Rev. Dr. Stone. He was a man whom neither his long vigils, nor his habits of abstinence, could reduce into the meagritude of sanctity, and who by his portly belly and rosy countenance, seemed to bid defiance

to the power of fasting and the devotion of prayer. Nothing could subdue his goodly corpulency, or invest his features with the emaciation which ordinarily attends the habits of mortification and self-denial which he practiced. He was the most uninterruptedly devout person I have ever seen, and verified those descriptions of lofty holiness with which the writings of Alban Butler (the uncle of the celebrated conveyancer) had rendered us familiar. The students were accustomed to the perusal of the lives of the saints, and found in Dr. Stone (except in his external configuration, in which Guido would certainly not have selected a model), a

realization of those pictures of exalted piety which occur in the pages of that learned compiler. He seemed to be in a perpetual commerce with heaven."

Another man who inspired Sheil's admiration, and left a strong impression on his character, was the superior of novices, Father Plowden, a descendant of Edmund Plowden, the great English lawyer of the reign of Queen Mary, the family having kept the faith. Father Plowden had been educated in Rome, and was transferred to St. Omer's after spending many years in Italy. "He was a perfect Jesuit of the old school. His mind was stored with classical knowledge; his manners were highly polished; he had great eloquence, which was alternately vehement and persuasive, as the occasion put his talents into requisition; and with his various accomplishments, he combined the loftiest enthusiasm for the advancement of religion, and an utter immolation of himself to the glory of the Order, of which he was unquestionably a great ornament. Though advanced in years, he stood erect and tall, with all the evidence of strong and inextinguishable vitality about him. His cheek, though worn, had the hues of health upon it, and though his head was quite bald, the vivacity of his eyes, which spoke