mother,” he repeated. I heard my mother weep aloud, and felt it like a repeal of that curse; but she dared not speak, and I could not. The Director had now two victims in his hands, and the third at his feet. He could not avoid showing his triumph. He paused, collected the full power of his sonorous voice, and thundered forth, “And of God!” And as he rushed from the room, accompanied by my father and mother, whose hands he grasped, I felt as if struck by a thunderbolt. The rushing of their robes, as he dragged them out, seemed like the whirlwind that attends the presence of the destroying angel. I cried out, in my hopeless agony of destitution, “Oh! that my brother were here to intercede for me,”--and, as I uttered these words, I fell. My head struck against a marble table, and I sunk on the floor covered with blood. “The domestics (of whom, according to the custom of the Spanish nobility, there were about two hundred in the palace) found me in this situation. They uttered outcries,--assistance was procured,--it was believed that I had attempted to kill myself; but the surgeon who attended me happened to be a man both of science and humanity, and having cut away the long hair clotted with blood, and surveyed the wound, he pronounced it trifling. My mother was of his opinion, for within three days I was summoned to her apartment. I obeyed the summons. A black bandage, severe head-ache, and an unnatural paleness, were the only testimonies of my accident, as it was called; and the Director had suggested to her that this was the time to FIX THE IMPRESSION. How well religious persons understand the secret of making every event of the present world operate on the future, while they pretend to make the future predominate over the present. Were I to outlive the age of man, I should never forget my interview with my mother. She was alone when I entered, and seated with her back to me. I knelt and kissed her hand. My paleness and my submission seemed to affect her,--but she struggled with her emotions, overcame them, and said in a cold _dictated_ tone, “To what purpose are those marks of exterior reverence, when your heart disowns them?” “Madam, I am not conscious of that.” “Not conscious! How then are you here? How is it that you have not, long before this, spared your father the shame of supplicating his own child,--the shame, still more humiliating, of supplicating him in vain; spared the Father Director the scandal of seeing the authority of the church violated in the person of its minister, and the remonstrances of duty as ineffectual as the calls of nature? And me,--oh! why have you not spared me this hour of agony and shame?” and she burst into a flood of tears, that drowned my soul as she shed them. “Madam, what have I done that deserves the reproach of your tears? My disinclination to a monastic life is no crime?” “In you it is a crime.” “But how then, dear mother, were a similar choice offered to my brother, would his rejection of it be