was a representation, in full life-size, of the descent from the cross. The weeping women had very sorrowful faces, and the wound in the Saviour’s side was gaping fearfully, and the blood still oozing out. As I was looking at it, a lady elegantly dressed, leading two children, four or five years old, entered a side door, and approaching this altar knelt before it, and turning her face upward to these images of the Saviour’s death, gazed long, and I suppose was praying. The sermon was still in progress, but she gave no heed to it. Perhaps, like myself, she was not able to understand it, and had come to worship, not to hear. When she had closed her protracted devotions, she took the little boy and girl and made them both kneel, where she had been kneeling, and look up as she had done, and when they had thus performed the service which she evidently prescribed, she led them out. Others cast themselves down before this and other altars, and with no attention to the service in progress, went on with their own prayers, and then left, or joined with the rest according to their pleasure. When the sermon was ended, long, and well delivered, in a persuasive, conversational tone, without notes, and with an evident air of earnest feeling, another priest, in gorgeous apparel, came to the high altar, and, attended by two or three boys to hold up his robes and move his missal-book from place to place, as he had to change his position, he proceeded to celebrate the mass. The officiating priest was an elderly man whose face indicated great intellectual force, and his appearance was that of a student and man of learning. As he took a golden chalice and laid his hands over it, and prayed, and then lifted it up while all the people bowed themselves with profound reverence, it filled me with amazement that such a man as he seemed to be could suppose that the wine in that cup had been miraculously and instantly converted into the blood of the Son of God!!! And when he held up in the same way a bit of bread in the shape of a wafer or thin cracker, two inches or so in diameter, and again all the people bent themselves in adoration, he himself, with uplifted hands and downcast eyes and moving lips, appeared to regard the ceremony as an immediate exhibition of a present and new-born God. Then he took the cup again and drank it, and drank once more, turning it bottom upward over his face; and when this was done he took a white napkin and dried the inside thoroughly, as if no drop of the sacred blood must remain within, and the door of a golden casket or closet on the altar being opened, he placed it within, with the bread he had converted, and locked it safely there. While this ceremony was going on, a priest had emerged from behind the altar, and with a brush in hand went up and down among the people, sprinkling them with holy water. A splendid organ and a choir of singers took part in the service, which was in all its parts imposing to