"The coincidence to my mind is this," said Mr. McGillicuddy, as his face brightened; "and it is a singular one I think, that here in this glorious and enlightened Republic, one thousand years later, the kinsman of this Munster prince, Rev. Denis O'Callaghan, when erecting his church, now all paid for, had in his employ the kinsmen of the four chiefs highest in command on that memorable occasion--viz: O'Keefe, O'Sullivan, O'Falvey and O'Connell, all professing the identical Christian creed their forefathers professed and practised. There are no barbarians here now, thank God, to hinder Christians from kneeling at their own shrine, and all as they chose, no matter how else they may differ on material and worldly questions. Here the kinsmen of these brave soldiers of the tenth century build temples to the Lord of Hosts, and are not called upon to defend them with their life's blood from the fire and sword of barbaric legions. Thus let us pray that with pure Christian foundations, the beloved union of States,--the Republic--may be in the quotation of Henry Grattan, '_esto perpetua_.'" The Ursuline Convent of Tenos. Twenty-three years ago there started from France four Ursuline nuns with the intention of founding a convent of their order in the island of Tenos, in the Greek Archipelago. The first idea had been to found this establishment in Syra, the chief commercial town of the Cyclades; but insuperable difficulties turned their hopes to Tenos, known to the ancient Greeks as the island of Serpents. Nothing could be more picturesque and lovely than the island, nothing less civilized. These four ladies, of high courage and energy, left the shores of the most civilized country in the world with the small sum of six hundred francs, upon which they resolved to start a school of Catholic education and charity in an island which had ceased to be universally Catholic from the time of Venetian rule. Having gone over the ground and realized (only dimly) their enormous difficulties, the complete sacrifice they were compelled to make of all bodily comforts, and the unendurable conditions of existence they bravely faced, I can only compare their courage with that which formed the annals of the earliest stages of Christianity. Becalmed upon a whimsical sea, they arrived at Tenos a little before eight in the evening. Tenos was the spot selected, or rather its village, Lutra, because the bishop had consented to the erection of a convent in his diocese. To readers accustomed to the resources of civilized travelling the hour of arrival is an inconsequent detail. Not so even to-day in Tenos. Judge, then, what it must have been twenty-three years ago! Four delicately nurtured women had to face a dark, rocky road, more of the nature of a sheer precipice than a road, late at night upon mules. I made the same journey at mid-day and felt more dead than alive after it. There is positively not a vestige of