"With hands outstretched, bleeding and bare, He doth in death his innocent head recline, Turning to the west. Descending from his height, The sun beheld, and veiled him from the sight. Thither, while from the serpent's wound we pine, To thee, remembering that baptismal sign, We turn and drink anew thy healing might." Let us, then, place, as Wordsworth says, "Like men of elder days, Our Christian altar faithful to the east, Whence the tall window drinks the morning rays." While I was lingering with peculiar interest before a monument to the memory of Cardinal de Cheverus, the first Bishop of Boston, and afterward Archbishop of Bordeaux, whose memory is revered in the Old World and the New, I heard a chanting afar off, and, looking around, saw through the open door a funeral procession coming hastily along the street toward the church, and singing the _Miserere_--coming, not with mournful step and slow, as with us, but like the followers of Islam, who believe the soul is in torment between death and burial, and so lay aside their usual dignified deportment and hurry the body to the grave. But in France the funeral _cortége_ does not necessarily include the relatives, and I felt this very haste might be typical of their eagerness to commence the Office of the Dead. Anyhow, I forgave them when, in the chapel draped in black, I saw them devoutly betake themselves to prayer during the Holy Sacrifice. I, too, dropped my little bead of prayer for the eternal rest of one whose name I know not, but which is known to God. "Help, Lord, the souls which thou hast made, The souls to thee so dear; In prison for the debt unpaid, Of sins committed here." The confessionals seemed to be greatly frequented the day I was at St. André's--those sepulchres into which rolls the great burden of our sins. There "The great Absolver with relief Stands by the door, and bears the key, O'er penitence on bended knee." What non-Catholic has not felt, at least once in his life, as if he would give worlds for the moral courage to lay down the burden of memory at the feet of some holy man endowed with the power of absolving from sin! Almighty God has made his church the interpreter between himself and his creatures; hence the peculiar grace a holy confessor has to meet the wants of the human heart laid bare before him. Zoroaster told his disciples that the wings of the soul, lost by sin, might be regained by bedewing them with the waters of life found in the garden of God. It is only the consecrated priest who has the power of unsealing this fountain to each one of us. These confessionals are distributed in the various chapels, everywhere meeting the eye of the parched and sin-worn traveller who would "Kneel down, and take the word divine, ABSOLVO TE."