world, and not the eternal interests of souls. Surely our petition is agreeable to God when we pray that all such religious families. may be maintained in their full fervour and efficiency, and that God may vouchsafe to inspire an adequate number of generous souls with the desire to devote themselves absolutely and irrevocably to His service under the consecration of the holy vows.

Fifty years ago four such souls received that summons and obeyed it. I know not if there were others who started with them some, perhaps, who "went away sad," and some who stayed but who have long ago exchanged their convent home for a Home still holier and happier. At any rate, we know that on St. Andrew's Day, 1854, those whose feast we are keeping, were thus called from their beloved fireside circles, where no doubt many hearts were twined around them. Perhaps they were upbraided for breaking away from such sacred ties, and abandoning homes where they were so much needed, giving happiness and doing good of various kinds. But very often the religious who comes away is able to exercise a far better and more effective influence for the happiness of those who remain behind; and at all events the decisive answer to every such remonstrance is the one that our Lord Jesus Christ desired to be given when on the first Palm Sunday He was fulfilling the prophecy which follows immediately the text I began with. Loose them and bring them to Me; and, if any man say anything to you, say that the Lord hath need of them."

The Lord hath need of them. Of these young virgin hearts our Lord deigned to have need. Are they able, after the lapse of so many years, to recall the feelings with which they made the first offering of themselves before the Tabernacle of the convent chapel when they entered these holy precincts, never to leave them again? They said with their heart at least, if not with their lips: "This is my rest for ever and ever; here will I dwell, because I have chosen it." It, namely Sion, which the royal prophet had mentioned just before. But for our youthful postulants their Sion was Sion Hill-so called prophetically in its remote secular days because the trees around it were saplings brought from Palestine, long before the convent chapel with its tabernacle had made the spot more holy than the Holy Land. "Here will I dwell because I have chosen it ;" and one of the chief motives of the choice is expressed in those preceding words of the Psalm : "For the Lord hath chosen Sion, He hath chosen it for His dwelling." In this sense every convent is Sion. "He hath chosen it for His dwelling." A certain holy religious for whom the veils of sacraments are now withdrawnshe is dead-used to rejoice at the opening of every new convent,

for this reason above all others, that each of them was another home for our Eucharistic Lord. Thanks be to God, He has been duly loved and honoured in the home that He thus chose for Himself at Sion Hill sixty-four years ago, fourteen years before the arrival of the four recruits that we are concerned with. How many Masses have been celebrated, how many Communions have been received, how many visits" have been paid, how many prayers have been offered up, how many acts of contrition and faith and hope and charity have been made before this beautiful altar and before the humbler ones that preceded it, back to the temporary altar that was first set up in a room of the two-storey cottage out of which this spacious convent has grown since the year 1840. When even we, cold-hearted as we are, are distressed at thinking of what a poor return God meets with for this uttermost excess of His love, let us console ourselves a little by remembering that some compensation is made to the Heart of Jesus in many a favoured spot like this.

But the vocation of these daughters of St. Dominic does not allow them to be exclusively absorbed in this personal devotedness to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. St. Catherine, not the patroness of this convent, not St. Catherine of Sienna, but St. Catherine of Genoa, once complained to Jesus: "Lord, Thou biddest me love my brethren, and I can love only Thee." He replied: "Catherine, they who love Me love those whom I love." Now, among those whom Jesus loves with a special love, the objects of His tenderest predilection are surely children. One of the good works dearest to the Heart of Jesus is the education of the young. To this great and arduous and wasting work these brave novices of fifty years ago devoted themselves by vow for life. How many girls have they helped to prepare for their various parts in the world, thus influencing innumerable souls directly and indirectly! What patient, persevering, and often thankless labour was involved in their relations with children during this last half century, teaching them in class and out of class, training them to habits of virtue and piety, forming their character, living with them as their elder sisters, and then, as the years went on, becoming to them as mothers.

Because [they] feel that in the heavens above
The angels, whispering to one another,
Know not among their burning words of love

A more endearing name than that of mother

therefore have many generations of youthful Irish maidens given that sacred name of Mother to these Dominican clients of St. Clare, Blessed Imelda, St. Bernard, and St. Augustine.

The life sheltered under the patronage of these four great names—one of them, indeed, can hardly be called great but only sweet and winning-that religious life was in due measure and degree marked by many of the virtues that distinguished the canonized bearers of those names. Like St. Clare, they renounced the world in their youth, and all that could attach their affections to earthly things. Like the angelic child Imelda, they gave their young hearts to God; and in their turn they have taught many a child to imitate Blessed Imelda in her longing for her First Communion, in her yearning love for the Holy Eucharist. Like St. Bernard the Mellifluous Doctor, they have always cherished a tender filial devotion to the Queen of Heaven, akin to that which makes the most easily-remembered of the Saint's honeyed words to be his passionate appeal to us in all our dangers to look up to the Star, to call upon Mary. Respice stellam, voca Mariam. And if we dare not seek a parallel in Augustine, the mighty bishop and doctor of the Church, his name reminds us at once of his mother St. Monica; and these nuns have trained up many a Monica to be to many a wanderer the star that guides him home to God.

She was

And here I cannot refrain from calling to mind one of those whom they trained from childhood, and whom that training helped to keep till the end innocent and bright with almost the childlike charm of Blessed Imelda herself, though her years at the end numbered Imelda's three or four times over. my first link with Sion Hill when I came to see as a happy novice the daughter of our sweet poet, Denis Florence MacCarthy, whom I had known as a child in her beautiful home of Summerfield, not many miles away. Sister Mary Stanislaus MacCarthy was only five years old when our four Jubilarians began their religious life, yet her religious life ended seven years ago. Her golden jubilee will be kept in heaven. If she were with us still, how she would have rejoiced in this day! How delightfully she would have exercised her inherited genius, which even her shrinking modesty could not hide, and would (perhaps after a little gentle compulsion) have brightened the feast with another of her "Songs of Sion"! Would have rejoiced with us, did I say? Nay, she rejoices! For they who are within the veil have keener sight than we who stand without. God lets them see and know all that is for their happiness and our good. The blessed ones who are with God have not grown less loving but more loving, by drawing nearer to the God of love; and that gifted and most affectionate heart that is still so tenderly remembered here has not forgotten there the Sisters whom she cherished, the Mother whom she loved and revered.

Many who are still on earth, but who are not here, feel that love and reverence, and are joining in spirit in this domestic feast. Not only the Sisterhood in this venerable Mother House and in its immediate offshoots, the two flourishing institutions in Eccles Street and Muckross Park, where so much solid and brilliant work has been done already, young as they areOur Lady of Sion in Eccles Street, the foundress of which, Mother Antonine Hanley, dying after six years of devoted toil, said brightly: "Others will roof in the buildings for me it is happiness enough to have been one of the foundation stones." Not only here at home in Ireland, but also in the colonies, sent forth in 1867 to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, and in 1870 to Dunedin in New Zealand, in each of which two or more convents have ever since been doing their beneficent work. I chance to have rather intimate relations with both of those colonies, and I know something about the immense good that is wrought for Catholicity, for the preservation and extension of the Faith, by the self-sacrificing labours of those missionary exiled nuns far away from their beloved Sion Hill.

In all this great work for God our Jubilarians have had their share; and all but one will agree that that one might truly exclaim with pious Eneas, Quorum pars magna fui! When the Sister to whom, with much misgiving, I venture thus to refer, had only counted the first decade of the Rosary of which to-day completes the full chaplet of five decades-the entire Rosary cannot be finished till we reach where the last of the Glorious Mysteries places us, at Mary's feet in Heaven, for each bead is a year of work and prayer, and a hundred and fifty such beads cannot slip through mortal fingers after ten years' experience this Sister was made Prioress to the delight of all except herself; and she has had much more than her fair share of that heavy cross, with very few breathing spaces, ever since. This, we may be sure, has been the hardest and most meritorious part of her fifty years of service. Fifty years!

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Well, that depends a good deal on the particular European of whom there may be question. But it is beyond all question that fifty years of Sion Hill, fifty years of the life lived and the work done at Sion Hill, are a noble contribution to the unrecorded history of God's Church in Erin, a powerful help towards the maintenance of the glorious tradition of ardent Catholic faith and crystal purity among the daughters of our dear land. Fifty years of such work is something to offer to God, some

thing to thank Him for. Judge O'Hagan was fond of repeating the remark of another great and eloquent lawyer, Lord Erskine : when he heard of a man dying worth £200,000, he would say, "That is a very pretty sum to begin the other world with.' Sad and bitter sarcasm! But we can truly say that the record we have glanced at is indeed a good investment for the other life, a good provision for eternity, when God, who has a reward for a cup of water given in His name, will know how to recompense, in a manner worthy of His infinite goodness and power, the lifelong service, of which this Golden Jubilee marks only an advanced stage but not yet the final term.

Yes, I will say it for the last time-this is something for which thanks and praise may well be offered up to God. Te Deum laudamus. To use those borrowed words again: God be praised for the long life of consecrated fidelity that He has given you, dear Sisters. You are praising and thanking God in your hearts for all that He has done for you; and we are here to help you to thank Him. May you, and may all of us, in our different callings and circumstances, correspond generously till the end with all the graces that God will give us to enable us to secure our appointed place in the Golden Jubilee of a happy eternity.

WIZARD WINDS

LAST night when winter whistled round my room,
Aglow with ember fire, I calmly pored
Over pages many-tongued and richly stored
With wit and fun and aught dispelling gloom.

So deep I read, a hidden bursting bloom

Of springtime bowers were scarcely less ignored Than those cold winds, when, lo! my window-cord, Exposed to them, gave forth a heavy boom.

The sound was one of spring's sweet sounds and brought Quick back to me the beetle of the wood

And vale, or drumming bittern of the bog;

And listening thus to bygone notes, methought
Those winter winds most magically good

To blend spring's voice with crackling of my log.

CHARLES L. KIMBALL, S.J.