the old priest before and paid it back with a high rate of interest. They plotted to get even with him. Giuseppe turned the care of his bit of property over to Giacomo and sailed for America. In a few months Giacomo went to the priest and offered as security for a loan of 300 lire the property which did not belong to him. The old priest took a note of temporary conveyance, installed one of his dependents in the property, gave Giacomo the 300 lire at twenty per cent per annum, and Giacomo went to Naples and sailed for New York. At the end of two years the old priest was beginning to consider the property already his, when Giuseppe came home on a visit, proved that his brother had no right to offer the property as security, and forced the priest to pay rent for it for two years. Giacomo was of course safe from harm in America. Giuseppe sold the property and returned, and is now in partnership with his brother in a little business on Vine Street, Cincinnati. In an effort to maintain in the eyes of their parishioners their own outward show of virtue, priests whose lives have vicious tendencies often commit crimes that are worse than murder. The attitude of the Church toward an adulteress is a matter of common knowledge. When it is said that the judging of the women of their parish is left in the hands of the priests, and that in small communities a woman disgraced by such judgment has no opportunity of hiding it from her neighbors, the terrible power of the _padre_ can be seen. There is scarcely a community which has not its pathetic story; some have many, and I have heard more than one told in brief whispers as the poor woman who was the object of it passed by. Yet, though convinced of her innocence, her neighbors do not dare take up her cause, for fear of bringing on their own heads what has fallen on her. A son of a well-to-do oil and wine merchant in a certain village was a patron of the priest in charge at the principal church of the town. He was in love with the daughter of the man who sold the salt and tobacco for the government. She refused his attentions, and, though there had never been a whisper of blame against her, one Sunday she found that the priest had directed against her the power of the Church. She bravely faced the conditions, stepped quietly into her new status in village life, and since then has been living such a life of self-sacrifice and nobility that her very deeds have daily given the lie to the charge against her. Since then the son of the oil merchant has ruined his father and fled to Australia, and the priest died a miserable death in a _torrente_ into which he stumbled while drunk; but to her is for ever denied everything most dear to a woman.