little benefit has been derived, as yet, from their
praiseworthy exertions.

Excellent results have been obtained in the
army by the establishment of libraries, reading-
rooms, and institutions, at nearly every one of
our military stations. "We have seen Telemachus,
and even Mentor with him, occasionally, investing
a portion of the bounty-money in the
purchase at these establishments of sundry cups of
a beverage very different in spirit and taste from
the drinks dispensed at the bar of the Cross
Muskets; while other good things from the
Institute bar (say, at Chatham) make up a little
repast, which they appear to enjoy immensely.
We will not affirm that the Cross Muskets never
receives a visit from the old soldier and his
protégé; but their visits are unquestionably
fewer than before, and further between.

MOP ALLEY, NEW ORLEANS.

THE sisterhood of St. Vincent de Paul have
colonised New Orleans, to the extent of a Baby-house,
where children are received from any
age under seven, and kept till that age; a
School-house, to which they are transferred at
seven, and kept till fourteen; and a Trade-house,
where they are apprenticed at fourteen, and
kept till they are twenty-one, and taught all
kinds of needlework, housework, nursing the
sick, good order, and a few prayers. No overwork
in devotion is allowed, lest the children
should be disgusted with piety when they reach
their majority, and set up praying and working on
their own account. Whatever money they have
earned in their apprenticeship over and above
paying for their keep, is theirs at their majority.

I do not know at whose door lies the sin
against taste of having invented the white
bonnet of the Sister of St. Vincent de Paul.
A sister's head looks always like a white goose
with spread wings. I think they do not sleep
in these bonnets, because they are never creased
or crumpled, but they always wear them when
visible to the public at home or abroad. Before
I had yellow fever in New Orleans, my taste
revolted against this prodigious head-dress, but
it has been as the wings of angels to me ever
since. One of my nurses was named Sister
Olivia; and, some months since, I found a good
likeness of her in porcelain, bending over a
holy water fount. She was very pretty, but the
bonnet had all its immutable ugliness. Did I
not buy the crockery sister greedily, and have I
ever put matches in the dry font?

Another of my nurses was Sister Angela. Of
all the many daughters of St. Vincent de Paul,
I think Sister Angela must have been one of
the plainest, and yet her face, and her winged
horror of a bonnet, became angelic in my sight.
We are apt to think of nuns and Sisters of
Charity as if they did not belong to this world,
as though they were never born, and never had
any relations. Now, Sister Angela was the
eldest sister of a New York merchant, who was
my intimate friend. When I told him I was
going to New Orleans for the first time, and
should be there in the fever season—"Whether
it come or not," he said, " I can do you a good
turn that a king could not do you. I can give
you a letter to my sister, Angela, who is a Sister
of Charity; and if you have the fever, you will
be quite safe with her care and your habits."
New Orleans was literally a city of death that
year. Never can its horrors be written, never
can the mercies and providences that prevailed
over and amid all, be chronicled. O how I
dreaded being thrust into one of those clay oven
graves, built up, because there is no earth in
swampy New Orleans in which to dig the narrow
house! The nameless public ovens for the
poor, were all filled to repletion that season.

I caught the dreaded yellow fever. It is a
disease that ranges on a sliding scale from a
heavy headache and bad taste in the mouth, to
all the horrors of plague, black vomit, and all-
pervading putridity. It comes on with indigestion
often unnoticed, and constipation almost
always neglected. If you are decently temperate,
and if you have no friend who is "a
drug doctor," and if you have an interest in
a Sister of Charity, or an old negro nurse,
you may count on getting up in two or three
days, or a week. I ought to know it gratefully,
remembering Sister Angela. Her system was,
to throw away the doctor's calomel and quinine,
and bathe her patients, and gave no physic but
lemon, verbena tea, and a dose of castor oil.
I got the fever and Sister Angela, on a Monday;
and I got a bath and a dose of oil the same day. I
slept swathed in wet towels on Monday night,
and had a great bath on Tuesday morning. I had
some mawkish gruel during the day, which I
would not take, though it was brought me by
the pretty Olivia of the holy water font. On
Tuesday night, I had more wet towels; on
Wednesday, I was able to bathe without help,
and to amuse myself by sucking oranges; on
Thursday morning I was discharged cured, with
a caution to eat little, bathe often, and not to
think. Blessed Sister Angela!

Well! all this was past and gone, and another
year had come to New Orleans, and I had come
also. I had been to see the Jesuits' church,
which is said to be one of the purest specimens
of Moorish architecture in the world. It was a
morning in the vicinity of May-day, and yet it
was melting summer-time already. The great
shadow of the interior of the church had been a
welcome refuge from the sunshine outside. Its
rows of twisted marble pillars supporting the
far up immense dome, and forming the aisles,
seemed a cool forest, in which I had plunged as
if I were the only human figure within its
umbrageous peace. I had only to rest. I was not
one of the white-robed girls, veiled and crowned
with orange-blossoms, who were making a procession
with lighted candles through the long aisles.
(Why do they never get burned? They never do.)

The stained-glass windows of this Moorish
temple for Christian worship are many, and
they cast all the hues of the rainbow amid the
shadows of the dim interior. Delicious hiding-