attention to the original of the character, which is intensely interesting,
though at the same time overtinged with romance.

Every six weeks' tourist has seen or heard of the _Sisters of Charity_ on
the Continent. They are nurses in the hospitals there, but on a system
very different from the hireling attendants in similar institutions in
England. Indeed, they may be said to have quitted the world to devote
themselves to the relief of those unfortunate persons, who people the
abodes of misery and distress. They form, it appears, a numerous body,
consisting of several thousand members, who are said to perform or
superintend the administration of 300 hospitals in France. They are united
under several denominations, as nuns of those monastic communities which
escaped the storms of the revolution. Many of them are in the prime of
life, and though not bound by absolute vows, devote the whole of their
time, and even die in the act of doing good. In spiritual matters, they
are under the jurisdiction of the bishop of the district in which the
hospital is situated; in temporal concerns they are subject to the
authority of the heads of the establishment to which they belong; but they
are chiefly under the guidance of the superior of their order. They are
fed and lodged at the expense of the hospital, and receive in addition, a
certain stipend for the purchase of clothes. In the hospital at Lyons,
(which forty or fifty years ago, was the only hospital in France which was
not in a barbarous state), there are about 150 of these _Sisters_, wearing
a uniform dress of dark worsted, and remarkably clean. They receive the
trifling sum of forty francs a year for pocket-money, and sit up one night
in each week; the following is a day of relaxation, and the only one they
have. During the siege of Lyons, when cannon-balls passed through the
windows, and struck the walls every moment, not one abandoned her post
near the sick.