This is a larger venture
             That in the Fisheries sank,
          And this is more than I like to tell—
             Swallowed in Dodge's Bank.

          "This is a newspaper, vanished,
             "With thrice a thousand at least;
          And this is a project, fair to study,
             For making champagne from yeast.
          This is a stone—pray watch it;
             Ten thousand fully told,
          For converting old shoes to sugar,
             And turning flint to gold!"

          And still he kept throwing, throwing
             The stones into the sea.
          "Howard! your losses grieve you!"
             "The devil a bit," quoth he;
          "But if I don't grow wiser
             Next time that Cash runs riot,
          I'll either drown or hang myself
             To keep my guineas quiet."

IN THE HONEYMOON.

          "Oh world! I've tried thee and I tire;
             Thy pleasures are but future pain:
          Though much is good that we desire—
             Nothing is good that we attain!"

          My love looked o'er my shoulder—
             Inquisitive beholder,
          As thus I wrote and thought,
             And said, "False rhymer, over free,
          Is this your verdict upon me,
             Despised as soon as caught?"

          Lovers, ye know the answer due!
             But quick as thought, her fingers flew
          O'er cheeks and ears like bolt from quiver,
             And slew the kiss I meant to give her.

THOSE CONVENT BELLES.

THERE is an old-fashioned expression,
"our wits jumped together," to denote
that two persons, without previous
concert, arrived at the same conclusion. It is
astonishing how people's wits, although
separated by time and place, will, under
like circumstances, jump together. On our
table there has been lying, not unread, a
book called "Le Couvent; Mémoires d'une
Religieuse," "Memoirs of a Nun, by Sister
X." We leave the candid reader to judge
whether anybody else's wits have lately
been jumping in accordance with the
authoress's.

Her story, though not short, is simple.
Under the influence of religious excitement,
she felt it her duty to leave her parents, and
quit domestic, for conventual life. Once
caged, her friends were further estranged
from her by silence and concealments which
were not her fault. Then grim death passed
that way, and rendered regrets and remorse
equally unavailing. The charm of enthusiasm
and novelty was broken before very
long; but the irrevocable step having been
taken, nothing remained but bitter repentance.
Her superiors were not slow to discover
the change, nor to mete out its
punishment without stint or mercy. In
such cases, both parties' minds become
envenomed; compromise and reconciliation
are scarcely possible. Persecution followed
persecution; until the refractory nun, to
escape incarceration in a dungeon, cut the
Gordian knot (instead of trying, like poor
Miss Saurin, to untie it) by scaling her
prison walls, and running away.

Sister X. repudiates, at the outset of her
narrative, any hostility to the Papal religion.
She has nothing to say either against the
celibacy of the clergy, or monastic vows.
What she would proclaim on the housetops
is, that multitudes of young girls are
caught by deceitful promises, of a happiness
unattainable on earth. She would tell them
that conventual life has its suffering, its
weariness, its regret, its persecution, its
bitterness. She would have everybody know
the abuse there made of moral force, in
default of material force.

We may be told, over and over again,
that nuns are no longer constrained by
violence. True; abbesses no longer have
their dungeons as a right; official
condemnations are out of fashion; but does not
moral compulsion still exist? What is to
become of a poor girl, whose dower has been
swallowed by the ever-gaping gulf of
monastic poverty? In vain will they say, as
to a prisoner who has completed his term,
"Go; you are free; the doors are open."
Go whither? When a justly-offended and
undervalued family have banished you from
their thoughts; when you have not a rag
to cover you, nor a farthing to buy a morsel
of bread, and when ruined health is your
only patrimony, where can you go ? Sister X.
requires that every person who has
become tired of a cloistered life, and who
brought a dower to the establishment,
should have a right, on retiring from it, to
at least a portion of that dower. It seems
to us that Sister X.'s wits have not, in this
matter, jumped alone.

Sister X. accuses nunneries of being too
much given to intrigue, indiscreet curiosity,
worldly frequentations, and, above all, to
an inordinate greed of gain. In convents,
as throughout the rest of the world, with
and for money almost everything can be
done. It strangely unsettles the balance of
justice. "A rich postulant! A noble
postulant! What a deal of good we might
do with her money! What dust we might
throw in people's eyes with her name!"
Whilst vulgar postulants are kept to the