insurgents. Even the dead were not allowed to be unmolested in their long last sleep.

The bodies of the priests who were slain at the Carmelite Convent were stripped by the assassins, thrown into carts and taken away to the cemetery of Vaugirard. There a large pit had been prepared, and into this the corpses were flung, to be consumed with quicklime, as the bodies of executed murderers usually are. Not all the bodies were taken there; a few of those who fell in the first onslaught in the garden were pitched into a well. The skulls of twenty-four priests, mostly cloven or gashed, were afterwards recovered from this well. These relics and some others have been removed to the crypt, and on the 2d of September every year they are now shown there. The spot in the garden where the first victim, the Abbé Girault, was struck down, is marked by a marble column, and the place at the end of the stone staircase where the others were done to death by Maillard's hired crew is marked by a slab bearing the inscription, "Hic ceciderunt."

A few priests contrived to escape the hands of the cruel murderers. One of these was the Abbé de la Pennonie, who had knelt down prepared to die, when some unknown friend whispered in his ear: "Run, my friend; run." There was a passage near, and into this the priest darted, but as he ran he got several sword-thrusts, but on he ran, and reached the street alive. He got into a friend's house, in the neighborhood, and found safety there till he secured passage in a ship to England. It was there that he related the particulars of the massacre, so far as he had witnessed it, to the Abbé Barruel, who included them in his book on "The Clergy During the French Revolution." Nine other priests were saved, either by some soldiers of the Guard or by sympathetic onlookers. Of these were the Abbés De Bartot, Barbet, Fronteau and Saurin. Abbés De Montfleury, De Rest and Vilar managed to scale the convent wall and hide in a neighboring garden till they found an opportunity of getting away from the danger. Two others, the Abbés Martin and De Keravanent, got on the roof of the church and concealed themselves until the bloody work was over.

20

In the Palace of the Luxembourg, hard by, amongst the paintings in the famous gallery there is one striking one depicting the last scene in a Paris prison ere the Reign of Terror came to an end. It depicts the process of reading out the list of the condemned, and the visitor to the "Convent des Carmes" would do well, before going to the hallowed spot, to study the painful but lifelike details of the grim picture. It will enable him easily to realize the difference in behavior between a batch of civilian condemned and a battalion of the soldiers of God ready to die for Christ, as the martyrs of the

C

AN IRISH FOUNDRESS.

ONVERSIONS from Protestantism to Catholicity are comparatively rare in Ireland. The racial and social lines of demarcation between the adherents of the ancient faith and the professors of the innovating creed, who long formed a dominant caste, were so sharply drawn that the religious question is not usually considered as a thing apart from politics and regarded on its exclusive merits as in England. Protestantism and Conservatism, representing the creed and the policy of the foreign element in the population, have mostly been convertible terms; and ever since foreign rule laid its heavy hand upon a country which has suffered so much from penal persecution and misgovernment, the deep-seated antagonisnt between the two creeds has been accentuated by political and social divisions. Although the line of demarcation is not now so rigidly traced, and in many parts, particularly in the South, is almost obliterated, and the antagonism is not so uncompromising on either side, owing to the political and social changes of recent years, from which has evolved a New Ireland-the popular movement having all but annihilated Protestant Ascendency-there was a time when the profession and practice of Catholicism meant social ostracism, when Protestants and Catholics in Ireland stood aloof, when the former, the members of a wealthily-endowed State Church, in their pride of place and in the enjoyment of positions and privileges from which the others were debarred, looked contemptuously down upon the fleeced and fettered Irish who clung to the only thing of which the conqueror could not rob them the Faith of their Fathers.

There is no rule without an exception; and the ruling caste in Ireland, even when Ascendency reigned and revelled, comprised not a few whose attitude and action were very different from the majority of their co-religionists. One of these was Dr. David Aikenhead, a Cork physician, who, in defiance of Protestant prejudice, married Miss Mary Stackpole, the daughter of a Catholic merchant, and became the father of Mary Aikenhead, the foundress of the Irish Sisters of Charity.

Born in that city on January 19, 1787, at an epoch when the penal laws were relaxed but not yet repealed, she was brought up as a Protestant; her father, while allowing his pious wife to follow her own religion, having stipulated that their children should be reared as members of the then Established Church. Providence, which had other designs in her regard, so ordained that she was put out to nurse, as it is phrased, with one Mary Rorke, who lived on Eason's Hill, now called Eason's avenue, a narrow lane on the north side of originally erected in 1766 by a Cork Dominican, Father Daniel Albert O'Brien, to replace the thatched building which stood on the site of the South Presentation Convent. Mary accompanied her grandmother to this church and to the North chapel and resumed saying the Rosary, in which she formerly joined along with her nurse and now added to her private devotions. Another Catholic influence was that of her widowed aunt, Mrs. Gorman, to whom she became very much attached. Assisting along with her for the first time at Benediction, she was greatly impressed by that simple and beautiful rite, which was explained to her as well as many other Catholic usages and devotions by her aunt, who gave her books to read, which she attentively perused. After a time she began to absent herself from Shandon church and to attend daily Mass at the Cathedral. She became more grave and thoughtful and felt more and more drawn towards Catholicism as the mists of prejudice were dispelled. The attraction was naturally strengthened by the death, on December 28, 1801, of her father, who was received into the Church, at his own request, before he passed away, consoled by the presence and ministrations of Bishop Moylan. A sermon by that prelate's coadjutor, Dr. Florence MacCarthy, seems to have fixed her resolution, and she declared to her aunt: "I shall never be happy until I am a Catholic." "Then why not become one at once?" was that good lady's reply. The response and the result was that on June 6, 1802, Mary Aikenhead, then in her sixteenth year, was received into the Catholic Church, making her first Communion on the feast of SS. Peter and Paul and getting Confirmation on July 2, the feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. These memorable dates were ever afterwards engraven in her mind, and to the close of her life she never omitted celebrating their anniversaries with joy and thanksgiving.

The story of her conversion is very simple in its few details in contrast with the complicated histories of other conversions. It