While telling me this, a bell rang, and the Mother, asking me to excuse her, knelt down in the room where we were sitting, and prayed for a few minutes, after which we resumed our conversation. I should have liked to have asked her what bell it was that summoned her to prayer, but did not like to discuss such a solemn subject as this would be to her. They never sent me away without a nice bouquet of fresh flowers, which would be picked from the garden while I waited. This pretty token was generally accompanied by a hearty “God bless you” as I turned to leave the convent. They were not so exclusively devoted to serious subjects as to forget the bodily wants of their visitors. On hot days a refreshing glass of iced lemonade and biscuits were always ready, and one’s requirements often anticipated with kindly forethought before they were made known. I am sorry to say that I was hurried away from Calcutta by telegram before I could pay a farewell visit to my kind friends. I feel sure I have no more sincere well-wishers in this work than the nuns of Loretto Convent, the memory of whose kind words and actions shall always be gratefully treasured up in my heart. CHAPTER XII. MEDICINE--NO WARM BATHS--AN UGLY LOOKING-GLASS--CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE LEPER ASYLUM--THE LEPER BOY--MR. BAILEY. At the Leper Asylum things were not looking bright. Dr. Unna’s medicine, which had arrived from London, had not been getting a fair trial. The European doctor under whose supervision it was given, having himself no faith in any of the prescribed cures for leprosy, had not placed his patients under a regular course of treatment. He was a doctor in practice in Calcutta, and we cannot blame him for refusing to personally superintend the treatment of lepers. A practitioner who was known to go regularly among lepers would find people chary of consulting him about ordinary ailments, and his practice would suffer in consequence. The lepers had the medicine; he would give instructions as to its application; but whether they took it or not was their own affair. An inmate of the Almshouse, who had been an apothecary, was employed in giving out the drugs used by the lepers, but there was no skilled doctor to superintend or be present when these medicines were administered. Daisy refused to try Dr. Unna’s medicine. When I asked her reason for doing so, after being so anxious for it to arrive, she told me that she would agree to take the pills, but that a greasy kind of ointment had to be rubbed over the body, and that, as there was no warm water procurable in which she could bathe, she would wait till the hot months, when she could take a bath and wash off the grease. This, I may explain, happened during what is known as the cold weather, when the lepers found it impossible to take cold baths; so preferred, in the absence of any warm ones, to do without. The attendant who was paid from our fund should have been told, if