neither missions nor schools--it is utterly dead--its priests are profoundly ignorant. These people have sinned against the Holy Ghost. He extended this charge of ignorance to the Russian priests. I observed that I had been told by an eye witness that the Church in Russia had the same sort of hold on the mass of the population as it had in the Middle Ages in Europe; but he seemed to think both people and priests densely ignorant. Many converts, he said, are made to Catholicism from the Armenians and other sects; but hardly any from the schismatic Greeks; however, as soon as they are instructed, they will give up their schism. The Pères Lazaristes direct ten séminaires in France; the S. Sulpiciens twenty: the Société de la Rue Picpus two; the Maristes one or two; the rest are directed by diocesan priests chosen by the bishop. As we rose to leave I asked him if the Sœur de Charité were still living to whom the vision of the Blessed Virgin had been granted. He replied that she was. But you have heard, I suppose, the miracle which has happened lately. We said we had not. A young novice, he continued, of the Sœurs de la Charité, on the 30th April last, received, in attending a sick sister, a most violent luxation of the vertebral column. The surgeon considered her case so full of danger that he refused to operate on it without calling in another. The head was turned round and pressed closely on the left shoulder; paralysis had seized on the left side, and the right was beginning to be affected. The surgeon said an operation might be performed, but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it failed. She had been several days in this state; the Supérieure of the Sisters was asked for a written authorisation to operate on her; she did not like to agree to this, unless the patient herself demanded it. At length they determined on a neuvaine of prayers to S. Vincent de Paul, the feast of the translation of whose relics they were then celebrating. This began on Sunday, the 7th May. After this had begun, the patient expressed the most earnest desire to be carried into the church of S. Vincent de Paul, and to be laid before the shrine containing his relics over the altar. She had the most confident persuasion that she should be cured by his intercession. Her confessor, as he told me, set himself against it as much as he could--he had given over her case, and was going to administer the last sacraments to her on the next day. At her repeated request it was referred to the Supérieur Général, and he gave his consent that she should be carried on a couch to the church between four and five in the morning. The Supérieur said to himself, as he told us, the case is desperate; if she dies on the way it will be no worse than it is now. She was accordingly carried to the church on Tuesday, the 9th of May, and laid before the altar; as the Mass went on, at the Gospel she took her face with both hands and pushed it round from where it had been