in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases "to be visited this morning." The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry, but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune; their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace. All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no nurses among the panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home," and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this