article, the first chapter of a book of travels, or the speech of a long-winded American ambassador at a Mansion House dinner. All was exceedingly decorous and diplomatic, slightly gilded here and there with those commonplace laudations that stir a British public into the utterance of patriotic plaudits. A more inoffensive entertainment could hardly be imagined; and when the six sections into which the lady had divided her discourse were exhausted, and her final bow elicited a renewal of the applause that had accompanied her entrance, the impression on the departing visitors must have been that of having spent an hour in company with a well-informed lady who had gone to America, had seen much to admire there, and, coming back, had had over the tea-table the talk of the evening to herself. Whatever the future disquisitions of the Countess of Landsfeld may be, there is little doubt that many will go to hear them for the sake of the peculiar celebrity of the lecturer." XXXIII THE MAGDALEN That celebrity was very far from corresponding to the present dispositions and aspirations of the ex-adventuress. While travelling from town to town the transmutation of her emotions into religious fervour had gone on unchecked. The love she had once borne to men found an object in the unseen God; the wondering disgust excited by the memory of her relations with men she had learned to dislike became translated into repentance for sin; latent ambition now leaped up at the thought of a crown to be won beyond the tomb. Christianity offers us new worlds for old, promises new joys to those who have lost all zest for the old, proposes an objective which may be pursued to the brink of the grave, and assures every human being of the tremendous importance of his own destiny. For these reasons religion has always appealed with especial force to women in Lola's situation, who, moreover, being usually deficient in the logical and critical faculties, are the less able to resist its appeal to their emotions. During her stay in England Lola kept a spiritual diary, some fragments of which have been preserved to us. It is certainly illustrative of the depth and earnestness of her religious convictions, and it would be a cold-blooded act to analyse and to dissect the state of mind it portrays. The sentiments are often morbid in the extreme, as might be expected from one whose ideas of religion were derived from teachers of the extreme evangelical school. She writes:--