that said person only took to her bed when the judicial knock sounded at the door. Scandalous wrangling, petty bickering, the zealous wrath of true conviction on either side,--there is room for them all in a contest like this, where every one must wear the badge of party in plain sight, and defend it as best he may, but defend it at all costs. To stand between two such hostile forces is to be regarded as an enemy by both, and is a situation that may seem equivocal even to lookers-on. Yet those who listen habitually to the one man who has chosen that unenviable post can hardly complain of want of clearness in his own defining of his position. Pere Hyacinthe is sometimes held to be on the high road to Protestantism. Any one who went out in the middle of some discourse of his, and so heard only the warm-hearted, candid confession of sympathy with all that is excellent among heretics, might carry away such an impression: those who remain until the inevitable "_mais_" with which the second proposition begins are convinced that to grasp the hand he holds out for Church unity the Protestants would have many more steps to take than he contemplates on his side, and that the meeting could by no means be a halfway one. Another numerously-supported opinion is that of his waiting only for a good opportunity to return to the true fold. Certain it is that at all times and in all places he calls himself a faithful son of that Church of which, as he ceases not to reiterate, he has never sought the ruin, but the reform. Who, however, hearing the scathing apostrophe that follows to the address of the misguided old man who holds the keys of St. Peter can feel that this son of Rome, devoted though he be, is very ready to sue for pardon? On the contrary, let the shepherd repent, then the wandering sheep may come back to the flock. A weightier charge against him than any other is that of betraying party, of faithlessly turning his back on the cause he once espoused. But that cause is still his, as he declares: no one has more at heart the success of the Old Catholic movement than he, no one a warmer desire to see the purified Church in the place that is hers of right; but also no one has a deeper abhorrence of that Church lending herself as a servant to political intrigues, be the government that sets them on foot called despotic or republican. And then the Grand Conseil comes in for no little scorn and contempt. Pere Hyacinthe may be a Jesuit in disguise, or a Calvinist at heart, or a broken reed that pierces the hand of him who leans on it; but there is still another hypothesis: he may be a man endowed with the rare gift of seeing all sides of a question with equal impartiality, and one not to be deterred by any party considerations from speaking his free opinion: in that case it is certain that he would find no place in either of the factions at variance in this commonwealth.