of Albert--recovery refused to the tears of Alexandrine? O God! where art thou? Thou art absent when they all wait for thee. Thou wert the witness of their innocent love, the author of their union. Thou wert with them when they were happy, and now they suffer, they cry, and thou dost not hear, and yet they have had days of perfect happiness and a youth without clouds. Thou didst create them. Thou hast forsaken them. Thou permittest that they should be afflicted, and when they cry, thou wilt not answer. Why didst thou say by thy prophet, "Before they call I will answer. As they are yet speaking, I will hear." Thy promises but add to their sufferings the pain of disappointed hope. O God! where art thou? With their hearts wrung by the same sorrow, the disciples were walking on the road to Emmaus, when meeting a stranger they confided to him their trouble. "We hoped that it was he who would have redeemed Israel, and to-day is the third day since these things were done." They did not know that God was present, though hidden from them in the silence of the little chamber, where these poor Jews, who represent too well our patience so soon exhausted, and our unworthy dejection, were sadly assembled together. Suddenly their hearts awoke and they recognized in the breaking of bread this ever-present God who gives himself to us as the pledge of future immortality. The miracle of the little cottage of Emmaus is enacted every day, and was visible at the death-bed of Albert de La Ferronays. Already at Venice, during the night of the 6th of March, Albert appeared oppressed in his sleep, and Alexandrine, overwhelmed by the agony of the coming separation, watched by his bed. "At half-past five," she writes, "the color left his lips, he spoke with effort and desired me to send for his confessor. 'Has it come to this? Has it come to this?' I cried; then I added at the same moment, 'now I am a Catholic.' In pronouncing these words, firmness, if not happiness, filled my heart." On the 14th of March she wrote to her mother a truly sublime letter, which I will quote at length. "From love and respect to you, my mother, I have not inquired into the claims of the Catholic religion for fear that I should find it true, and I should be forced to embrace it. But now I am possessed with an irresistible desire to belong to the same faith as my Albert. At no price, however, not even to soften the death-bed of my husband, would I act disloyally toward God. Be assured, I shall not act without conviction. Dear mother, allow me to be instructed, and when you meet again your poor widowed daughter, ah! you will not repine at her being a Catholic. If the Catholic Church had no other advantage over ours than that she prays for the dead, I should prefer her." On his side Albert, with his dying hand, traced in his journal these words, which were his last: "O Lord! I implored thee by day and by night, Give her to me, grant me this joy if it only lasts for one day.