The old Quakeress is not a fashionable saint, for she never dreamed of this huxter business in spiritual affairs. Out of the overflowing goodness of her heart, she had tried to lighten the miseries of life in her own humble and quiet way, and found her happiness in seeing all about her made comfortable. The money that others expended in buying masses for the repose of their own souls and those of their relatives after death, she expended in ministering to soul and body in this world, leaving to God above the affairs of departed spirits, to deal with them according to His mercy. She never presumed to add to the torments of this life, or undertook to lighten the torments of the departed. Her duties lay all in this world, and when her labors were ended, she quietly lay down in death, leaving her future condition to God. She never would pierce her bosom with an iron cross, though it had often been pierced by the trials of life. She has seen enough of real poverty and mortification, but never dreamed of such a thing as poverty and mortification self-imposed, by wearing upon her flesh a garment of sacking-cloth, or the ingenious invention of a bed so contrived as to deprive herself of wholesome sleep. Images and holy water occupy no place in her creed, though soap and water are almost too prominent. She did her good deeds from a sense of duty which she owed to her kind, and from the pleasure that it gave her to relieve misery while discharging the ordinary duties of life, and never dreamed of the sweet odor her good works left behind her--an odor which followed her to heaven--an odor more acceptable to the Almighty than all the endowments she might have left to pay for masses for the repose of her soul. SELF-CASTIGATION. There is so much that is monotonous in talking over the details of affairs of the different orders of these female monks, from the Sister of Guadalupe to the Sisterhood of Mercy, that it is as well to consider them as one, as divers households of single women, who, to win extraordinary favor of God, had separated themselves from their families, and devoted their lives, some to repeating prayers and acts of self-mortification, some to attending at the hospitals on the sick or the blind, the idiotic, the deformed, the deaf and the dumb, others to educating young ladies according to their peculiar notions of education, others again consecrating themselves to pauperism, and living upon charity; and when the daily supply of alms has failed, these self-made poor sisters collect together, and there wait and pray, and ring their bell, until some benevolent individual shall chance to hear the well-known signal, and come and relieve them.