convent-slaves of the eastern church (in the Byzantine empire, for instance) were not often permitted to enjoy the privacy of their wretched dens; their dormitories were packed like the bunks of a Portuguese slave-ship, and the word Syncellus (cell-mate) is used as a cognomen of numerous ecclesiastics. The abbot, and in less ascetic centuries perhaps the learned clerks (legend-writers, etc.), were the only members of a monastic community who could ever rely on the privacy of a single hour. For the admitted purpose of mortifying their love of physical comforts, the weary sleepers, worn-out with penance and hunger, were summoned to prayer in the middle of the night, or sent out on begging expeditions in the roughest weather. Every vestige of furniture or clothing apt to mitigate the dreariness of discomfort was banished from their cells; they suffered all the hardships without enjoying the peace and security of a hermit’s home; novices (on probation), and even the pupils of the convent-schools, were submitted to a similar discipline, and thus monasticism became the training-school of modern tenement-life. During the latter half of the Middle Ages, feudalism found an additional motive for suppressing the love of domestic independence. The church usurers and aristocrats monopolized real estate, and made it more and more difficult, even for the most industrious of their dependants, to acquire a share of landed property. Every feudal lord secured his control over his serfs by crowding them together in a small village (literally an abode of villains, i.e., of vile pariahs), where his slave-drivers could at any time rally them for an extra job of socage duty. The incessant raids of mail-clad highway-robbers—robber knights and marauding partisans—obliged all peace-loving freemen to congregate for mutual protection and rear their children in the stone prisons of an over-crowded burgh. The suppression of all natural sciences, including the science of health, aggravated the evil by a persistent neglect of such partial remedies as disinfectants and artificial ventilation. The home of a medieval artisan combined all the disadvantages of a jail and a pest-house. The revolt against feudalism has at last broken the stone-fetters of our larger cities; city walls have been turned into promenades, and convents into store-houses or lunatic asylums; but the spirit of monasticism still survives; indifference to the blessings of health and domestic independence seems to have acquired the strength of a second nature, and thousands of our modern factory slaves actually prefer their slum-prisons to the freedom of a cheaper suburban home. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.