My lady she sate erect, and sterner grew, Finger on mouth she motioned me not to stay; A girl came in, the wife of the dead I knew, She held his babe, and, neighbor, I fled away! I tried to run, but I heard the widow's cry. Neighbor, I have been hurt and I am not well: I pray to God that never until I die May I again have such sorry news to tell. The next piece we shall cite has travelled across the Atlantic, and come back again under false pretences, and without its author's leave or knowledge. Some years ago an American newspaper published some pathetic stanzas, to which it gave as a title "Exquisite Effusion of a Dying Sister of Charity." One into whose hands this journal chanced to fall, read on with interest and pleasure, feeling the verses strangely familiar--till, on reflection, he found that the poem had been published some time before in _The Month_, over the well-known initials "R. M." As the American journalist named the Irish convent where the Sister of Charity had died--not one of Mrs. Aikenhead's spiritual daughters, but one of those whom we call French Sisters of Charity--the reader aforesaid went to the trouble of writing to the Mother Superior, who gave the following explanation: The holy Sister had been fond of reading and writing verse; and these verses with others were found in her desk after her death and handed over to her relatives as relics. They not comparing them very critically with the nun's genuine literary remains, rashly published them as "The Exquisite Effusion of a Dying Sister of Charity." The foregoing circumstances were soon afterwards published in the _Boston Pilot_; but the ghost of such a blunder is not so easily laid, and the poem reappears in _The Messenger of St. Joseph_ for last August, under the title of "An Invalid's Plaint," and still attributed to the dying Nun, who had only had the good taste to admire and transcribe Miss Mulholland's poem. In all its wanderings to and fro across the Atlantic many corruptions crept into the text; and it would be an interesting exercise in style to collate the version given by _The Messenger_ with the authorized edition which we here copy from page 136 of "Vagrant Verses," where the poem, of course, bears its original name of "Failure." The Lord, Who fashioned my hands for working, Set me a task, and it is not done; I tried and tried since the early morning, And now to westward sinketh the sun! Noble the task that was kindly given To one so little and weak as I-- Somehow my strength could never grasp it, Never, as days and years went by. Others around me, cheerfully toiling, Showed me their work as they passed away; Filled were their hands to overflowing, Proud were their hearts, and glad and gay.