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against him: they, on their part, are bound to state whatever they may have noticed amiss in his conduct. Of course, external defects alone are to be mentioned. Instead of saying, “Notre Frère is not fervent,” they must point out fixed acts of seeming negligence in religious duties, which may spring from absent-mindedness quite as well as from lack of fervour. This exercise, properly practised, effectually stops all backbiting or complaints against others; while the defects are made known to the person himself, so that he can take advantage of this knowledge. It is quite an upside-down world.

The fact that so many virtues—charity, modesty, cordiality, piety, self-possession, gaiety—are requisite to pass the Recreation well, is the reason why the result is so generally unsuccessful. Some, striving to be supernatural in all things, contrive to be only unnatural and highly disagreeable in all. Others, very rightly laying down as a first principle that one must be natural, forget their position, and talk as they used to talk, before they “left the world.” A few sentences having been exchanged about the weather, one novice, eager to avoid “useless words,” effectually puts an end to the conversation in his group by relating, immediately and without transition, what he is reading about the torments of hell. Another has filled a little note-book with anecdotes and sentences of the Saints about the Mother of Christ: he begins the Recreation by asking his brother novices to “tell him something about Mary”; and, on their professing themselves unequal to the task, launches off for a whole hour into a sea of words learned by heart. The Franco-Irish Brother makes his companions roar with laughter at the tricks he played on his teachers whilst at college; but by his side walks a mournful one; who, mindful of Seneca’s saying, “Quoties inter homines fui, minor homo redii,” and of the Eastern proverb, “Speech is silver, but silence is gold,” has resolved to be silent,—and does not even look up once during the whole time. And the difficulty is greater still, because one is never allowed to choose one’s companions; the first group you find is your group. They are, besides, generally formed by the Admoniteur at the beginning of the Recreation; he, according to instructions received, often puts together, as a test of temper, the most opposite characters of all. How amusing it is to see the Frère Directeur, late a lieuntenant in the Mobiles during the war—a rollicking, jovial lover of harmless fun, and a great hater of what he calls “mysticism,”—walking about day after day and week after week with the Seraphic Brother above mentioned, who never will speak of anything less holy than the Sacred Heart, the conversion of the whole world, or a scheme formed by him for administering all railways by some new religious Order, designed to stoke and convey the passengers gratis, for the love of God! If you step into the Novitiate a month later, you will find them both in the same room; when Frère Séraphique begins sighing and groaning in his meditations, Frère Directeur has orders to put a stop to this piété extérieure by a loud, dry cough.

Then there are differences of principle too. Who would fancy that in the Novitiate, on a mere question of interpretation of the Rules, there could be found a vestige of two great parties? Yet so it is. Frère Admoniteur is waxing very red in the face, and having