really is promotion to me, who have always been considered to need it myself. I had thoughts of advertising to see whether any one wished for any, of the best quality, and here you are actually wishing to be advised. Then, to the best of my great ability, I shall do so; yet, being employed as ambassadress, I must be as cautious as any cabinet minister. Now for it! NEVER REFUSE A GOOD OFFER! The idea is perfectly original. I might take out a patent for it, but my invention is quite at your service. Take what fortune provides, and ask no questions."

"If I have any just claim on unknown relatives, let them become known. Till they do, I prefer dependence on a known benefactress, on whom I have no earthly claim but her own generous affection," replied Beatrice, looking disappointed to receive no information. "With all that is necessary Lady Edith has liberally supplied me, and I ask no luxury but entire confidence and mutual attachment. Till these generous friends receive me and receive my thanks personally, I do not need their assistance. It would be an injury to my benefactress were I to say that I require anything from them."

"How absurdly ceremonious!" exclaimed Lady Anne, laughing. "As soon as you cease to be a heretic, they are all ready to introduce themselves to you.'

"If they are to wear a mask till I comply with that condition, we must be for ever strangers," answered Beatrice, with a regretful smile. "I feel more and more the impossibility of

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"Oh! never mind protestations, or what you feel and think now," interrupted Lady Anne, assuming a careless tone. "Rome was not built in a day, and neither can people be converted in five minutes, or even in five weeks. My dear friend! let me put this curl in its place. There-all right—ah! you are like nobody on earth but yourself! Here comes Madame Mettarie with a show of artificial flowers. You are to choose a wreath in which to look superlatively beautiful at dinner to-day, and Madame Mettarie has made you this morning, with her patent self-acting steam-needles, a lovely dress, in which you will look quite superb."

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Lady Eaglescairn desires that I shall do nothing but attend on Mademoiselle Farinelli," said Madame Mettaire, with her eyes on the ground, in the last extreme of humility; " and I can have no greater pleasure."

"Well, I hope the pleasure may last you for life," said Lady Anne, with her most atttactive smile to Beatrice. "Miss Farinelli is to stay here till she tires of us all, but we treat her so atrociously ill, that I wonder she tolerates us for an hour."

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"It would be perfectly savage not to feel obliged for all the kindness I am overloaded with here," said Beatrice, in a tone of grateful but meditative anxiety; yet, whatever pleasure I should naturally have felt in meeting with so much generous attention, is destroyed by my uncertainty on what foundation it all rests."

Lady Anne made no reply, being for once at a loss what to say. She had set her heart upon

performing a meritorious act, by bringing over Beatrice as a trophy of her own to Rome, and she was by no means satisfied with the success of her first attempt. Trusting much, however, to the sudden formation of an eternal friendship, on the true boarding-school model, and to her own enthusiastic representations of Romanism, she determined to persevere through every imaginable discouragement; and she did. By professing the most outrageous happiness, and that she had never known peace till after giving up all power of judging or acting for herself, Lady Anne tried to persuade Beatrice that judgment and conscience were given to rational beings in vain, and that it was the utmost presumption of any one except a priest ever to use those noblest gifts of God at all.

"You are at very unfair odds, Miss Farinelli, against the whole house; but here is a book I wish you should read," said Lady Anne, one day, to Beatrice. "It is the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Like you, she was troubled with doubts respecting the absolute authority of the Church, and its right to make us believe what is even against the evidence of our senses; but she escaped that snare by prostrating her own mind, will, and opinions, as if they were dead, before the authority of her confessor. At the close of her long life, spent in blind, headlong, unquestioning obedience, even at the total surrender of her conscience to the voice of the Church speaking through the priest, Elizabeth became, by starving and sleeplessness, so eminent a saint that she performed miracles!"

"Then she was either a lunatic, fit only for Bedlam, or an imposter deserving imprisonment!" exclaimed Lord Iona, indignantly. "I saw several such soi-disant saints abroad, and they were quite delirious with spiritual pride. There was no more ground for their pretence to supernatural powers than Johanna Southcote had!"

"I see daily at Heatherbrae a greater miracle than any Popish saint ever performed," added Beatrice, with affectionate enthusiasm: "Lady Edith is not raised in body off the ground during any fifty-times-repeated Ave Marias, as some of your saints are said to be; but she lives, in society or in solitude, always so under the influence of religion, that not a word she speaks, not a breath she draws, is without a pleasing consciousness that, under the benignant eye of an invisible Creator, she is answerable for a right and thankful use of all his gifts. There is gross materialism in your religion, not only in the solid and monstrous idols you worship, but also in the scourging and maltreating of your own bodies."

"Surely you cannot object to a sinner anticipating in time the punishment he deserves in eternity, and laying up a store of merit also for those he loves. You should read of St. Alphonso Liguori, who scourged himself a few years ago to such an excess, that his friends had to burst open his door, and snatch the discipline out of his hands, fearing he might cause his own death."

"And so commit suicide," interrupted Lord Iona. "Self-murder is a new virtue that I am not accus

tomed to admire; and a man might just as usefully thrash water to raise bubbles as beat himself."

"While Father Eustace is at his devotions, you may hear the whistlings of the lash when passing his door," added Lady Anne in a reverential whisper; "and he always uses the prayer of St. Alphonso, 'Add torments to torments: let these be in satisfaction for my sins!" "

"Such is the pride of man, and so is he punished," said Beatrice, mournfully. "Those who will not accept a pardon as the free gift of that Saviour who came on earth to be our sole Redeemer, lose all their cheerful confidence in God's mercy, and torture themselves with useless austerities which a Hindoo might pity. One would fancy that the Popish saints had found a new edition of the Bible, with every word of the old one left out."

"If our merits are to be measured by our voluntary sufferings, a Hindoo will far out-bid the best of you," observed Lord Iona. "They hang themselves by a hook through their flesh, and swing in the air round and round for hours, and many travellers allege that they really can suspend themselves without support in the air. They starve within a mouthful of their lives, and mutilate their unfortunate bodies to perfect extinction. You do not admire these devotees, Anne, therefore why call St. Simon of the Pillar 'a glorious model,' entitled to such preeminence that beside him the brightest star grows pale, and he could spare some superfluous merit for those who had none?"

"That claim shows how much real pride there