As for my friend Bill, from being the pleasantest and most genial of fellows, he became a morose, misanthropic man. Dr. Franklin has a significant proverb,--"Silks and satins put out the kitchen-fire." Silks and satins--meaning by them the luxuries of housekeeping--often put out not only the parlor-fire, but that more sacred flame, the fire of domestic love. It is the greatest possible misery to a man and to his children to be _homeless_; and many a man has a splendid house, but no home. "Papa," said Jennie, "you ought to write and tell what are your ideas of keeping a _home_." "Girls, you have only to think how your mother has brought you up." Nevertheless, I think, being so fortunate a husband, I might reduce my wife's system to an analysis, and my next paper shall be,-- _What is a home, and how to keep it?_ * * * * * THE CONVULSIONISTS OF ST. MEDARD Of all the mental epidemics that have visited Europe, beyond question the most remarkable, and in some of its features the most inexplicable, is that which prevailed in Paris some hundred and thirty years ago, among what were called _the Convulsionists of St. Medard_. The celebrated Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, during his life the opponent and enemy of the Jesuits, whom he caused to be excluded from the theological schools of Louvain, left behind him, at his death, a treatise, posthumously published in 1640, entitled, "Augustinus," in which he professed to set forth the true opinions of St. Augustine on those century-long disputed questions of Grace, Free-Will, and Predestination. Taking ground against the Molinists, he contended for the doctrine of Predestination antecedent and absolute, a gift purely gratuitous, of God's free grace, independent of any virtue or merit in the recipient soul. This doctrine, set forth in five propositions, was condemned, in the middle of the seventeenth century, by Popes Innocent X. and Alexander VII.; and against it, when revived by Father Quesnel in the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was fulminated, in 1713, by Pope Clement XI., the famous Bull _Unigenitus_. From this Bull, accepted in France after long opposition, the Jansenist party appealed to a future Papal Council, thence deriving their name of _Appellants_. Among these, one of the most noted and zealous was the Diacre Paris, who refused a curacy, to avoid signing his adhesion to what he regarded as heresy, consumed his fortune in works of charity, and his health in austerities of a character so excessive that they abridged his life. Dying, as his partisans have it, in the odor of sanctity, and protesting with his last breath against the doctrines of the obnoxious Bull, his remains were deposited, on the second of May, 1727, in the small church-yard of St. Medard, situated in the twelfth _arrondissement_ of Paris, on the Rue Mouffetard, not far from the Jardin des Plantes.