measure of my feeble ability in the same way as the vile vices of lascivious women are there represented." It is interesting to see how she executes her plan. Take for example, her play entitled Abraham. In this an old hermit hears that his stepdaughter, who had run away with a seducer, is living in abject misery. He seeks to rescue her from a house of ill repute where she has sought shelter. She does not recognize him in his disguise, but he comes to see all the wretchedness of her life of shame, and melts her heart in a wonderfully poetic conversation which reminds one of Erasmus's colloquy between the youth and the fallen woman. "O my daughter, part of my soul, Maria, do you recognize the old man who with fatherly love brought you up and betrothed you to the Son of the Heavenly Lord?" "Whither has flown that sweet angelic voice which formerly was yours?" "Your maiden purity, your virgin modesty, where are they?" "What reward, unless you repent, is before you? You that plunged wilfully from heavenly heights into the depth of hell!" "Why did you flee from me? Why did you conceal your misery from me from me who would have prayed and done penance for you?" The miserable woman in her agony replies only by exclamations of pain, and confesses: "After I had fallen a victim to sin, I did not dare approach you." Abraham replies to that: "To sin is human, to persist in sin is hellish. He who stumbles is not to be blamed, only he who neglects to rise as quickly as possible." In the play Dukitius, the Roman general so named, to commit an act of criminal wantonness, enters at night time the prison of three Christian maidens who had been thrown into confinement by order of Diocletian, the persecutor of Christians. But the would-be ravisher is confounded by the Holy Virgin, the protectress of innocence, and takes the pots and kettles and pans for the maidens. The virgins look through the chinks of the wall, and see the fool out of his mind holding the pots caressingly on his lap, and kissing tenderly the pans and kettles. Irene remarks: "His face and his hands and his clothes are soiled and blackened all over by his imaginary sweethearts." "Just as it should be," replies Chiona, "it is the color of Satan who possesses him."