The Order of Sion is a rather peculiar one, its principal object being the conversion to Christianity and subsequent education of young Jewesses. It has been founded within the last forty years by the brothers Ratisbonne, both of them Jews of distinction converted to Christianity. The elder brother (they are both priests now) superintends the order in Europe: the younger resides at the mother-house at Jerusalem. The convent is an educational establishment, where the daughters of Orientals of all kinds are received--Jews, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, etc. In Europe the houses, of course, do not confine themselves to Jewish pupils, else they would find less work than their many hands could do, but receive boarders and give a solid education like the other and more fashionable convents. As a child I lived nearly a year in one of these houses, a large, roomy, silent villa, two hours from Paris. Behind the house was a garden and grove crossed in all directions by bewildering little paths leading into unexpected hollows where a rustic altar and statuette of Our Lady would be placed, or a crucifix erected in startling loneliness on a little hillock. A wide avenue of lime trees, where the pupils might be seen early in the morning studying their tasks, or in the afternoon eating their luncheon of grapes and brown bread, traversed this grove in a straight line, and here on certain feast-days nuns and pupils would form picturesque processions, with the customary banners, tapers, white veils and swelling hymns. Here the Ratisbonne brothers came to rest from their work of furthering the interests of the order--the elder a fatherly, portly man with white hair and a gentle manner, the younger a bronzed, black-bearded man, a true Oriental, with enthusiasm expressed in every line of his countenance and every flash of his piercing eye. He was only on a visit at that time, and then, as now, made Jerusalem his permanent home. There are one or two convents of this order in England, but I think none as yet in America.