James lies all day abed; Cary plays nurse to papa; mamma and I sit moping beside a little miserable stove till evening, when we receive our one solitary visitor,--a certain Father M'Grail, an Irish priest, who has been resident here for thirty years, and is known as the Padre Giacomo! He is a spare, thin, pock-marked little man, with a pair of downcast, I was going to say dishonest-looking, eyes, who talks with an accent as rich as though he only left Kilrush yesterday. We have only known him ten days, but he has already got an immense influence over mamma, and induced her to read innumerable little books, and to practise a variety of small penances besides. I suspect he is rather afraid of _me_,--at least we maintain towards each other a kind of armed neutrality; but mamma will not suffer me to breathe a word against him. It is not unlikely that he owes much of the esteem mamma feels for him to his own deprecatory estimate of papa, whom he pronounces to be, in many respects, almost as infamous as a Protestant. Cary he only alludes to by throwing up hands and eyes, and seeming to infer that she is irrecoverably lost. I own to you, Kitty, I don't like him,--I scarcely trust him,--but it is, after all, such a resource to have any one to talk to, anything to break the dull monotony of this dreary life, that I hail his coming with pleasure, and am actually working a rochet, or an alb, or a something else for him to wear on Saint Nicolo of Treviso's "festa,"--an occasion on which the little man desires to appear with extraordinary splendor. Mamma, too, is making a canopy to hold over his honored head; and I sincerely hope that our _oeuvres méritoires_ will redound to our future advantage! I am half afraid that I have shocked you with an apparent irreverence in speaking of these things, but I must confess to you, dearest Kitty, that I am occasionally provoked beyond all bounds by the degree of influence this small saint exercises in our family, and by no means devoid of apprehension lest his dominion should become absolute. Even already he has persuaded mamma that papa's illness will resist all medical skill to the end of time, and will only yield to the intervention of a certain Saint Agatha of Orsaro, a newly discovered miracle-worker, of whose fame you will doubtless hear much erelong.