such a delicacy, neatness, and exactitude as women use in these matters. A physician and surgeon, appointed by the Government, visited this hospital, and were resorted to in cases of difficulty or where operations were necessary. Howard, in describing the principal hospital at Lyons, which he praises for its excellent and kindly management, as being "so clean and so quiet," tells us that at that time (1776) he found it attended by nine physicians and surgeons, and managed by twelve Sisters of Charity. "There were Sisters who made up as well as administered all the medicines prescribed; for which purpose there was a laboratory and an apothecary's shop, the neatest and most elegantly fitted up that can be conceived.” *

Louise de Marillac-better known as Madame Legras,—when left a widow in the prime of life, could find no better refuge from sorrow than in active duties, undertaken "for the love of God." The famous Vincent de Paul, who had been occupied for years with a scheme to reform thoroughly the prisons and hospitals of France, found in

*Howard also mentions the hospitals belonging to the order of Charity, in all countries, as the best regulated, the cleanest, the most tenderly served and managed of all he had met with. He mentions the introduction of iron bedsteads into one of their hospitals as something new to him.—(In 1776).

Madame Legras a most efficient coadjutor. They constituted on an improved basis the the order Hospitalières, since known as the Sisterhood of Charity.

Within twenty years this new community had two hundred houses and hospitals; in a few years more it had spread over all Europe. Madame Legras died in 1660. Already, before her death, the women prepared and trained under her instructions, and under the direction of Vincent de Paul, had proved their efficiency, on some extraordinary occasions. In the campaigns of 1652 and 1658, they were sent to the field of battle, in groups of two and four together, to assist the wounded. They were invited into the besieged towns to take charge of the military hospitals.

They were particularly conspicuous at the siege of Dunkirk, and in the military hospitals established by Anne of Austria, at Fontainebleau. When the plague broke out in Poland, in 1672, they were sent to direct the hospitals at Warsaw, and to take charge of the orphans, and were thus introduced into Eastern Europe; and, stranger than all they were even sent to the prison-infirmaries, where the branded forçats, and condemned felons lay cursing and writhing in their fetters.

It is not, I believe, generally known in this country that the same experiment has been lately tried, and with success, in the prisons of Piedmont, where the Sisters were first employed to nurse the wretched criminals perishing with disease and despair; afterward, and during convalescence, to read to them, to teach them to read and to knit, and in some cases to sing. The hardest of these wretches had probably some remembrance of a mother's voice and look thus recalled, or he could at least feel gratitude for sympathy from purer, higher nature. As an element of reformation, I might almost say of regeneration, this use of the feminine influence has been found efficient where all other means had failed.

At the commencement of the French Revolution the Sisterhood of Charity had 426 houses in France, and many more in other countries; the whole number of women then actively employed was about 6,000. During the Reign of Terror, the Superior (Madame Duleau), who had become a Sister of Charity at the age of nineteen, and was now sixty, endeavored to keep the society together, although suppressed by the Government, and in the midst of the horrors of that time, it appears that the feeling of the people protected these women from injury. As soon as the Consular govern

ment was established, the indispensable Sisterhood was recalled by a decree of the Minister of the Interior.

I can not resist giving you a few passages from the preamble to this edict-certainly very striking and significant-as I find it quoted in a little book now before me.

It begins thus:

66

Seeing that the services rendered to the sick can only be properly administered by those whose vocation it is, and who do it in the spirit of love;

"Seeing, farther, that among the hospitals of the Republic, those are in all ways best served wherein the female attendants have adhered to the noble example of their predecessors, whose only object was to practice a boundless love and charity; Seeing that the members still existing of this society are now growing old, so that there is reason to fear that an order which is a glory to the country may shortly become extinct;

66

"It is decreed that the Citoyenne Duleau, formerly Superior of the Sisters of Charity, is authorized to educate girls for the care of the hospitals,” etc.

I confess I should like to see an Act of our Parliament beginning with such a preamble!

In all the Sisters of Charity I have known, I

have found a mingled bravery and tenderness, if not by nature, by habit; and a certain tranquil self-complacency, arising not from self-applause, but out of the very abnegation of self, which had been adopted as the rule of life.

I have now given you a rapid and most imperfect sketch of what has been done by an organized system of charity in the Roman Catholic Church.

MRS. JAMESON, Sisters of Charity.