floor with their foreheads. The whole looked like an incantation, or a scene in Robert le Diable. The novice was then raised from the ground, and led to the feet of the Bishop, who examined her as to her vocation, and gave her his blessing; and once more the black curtain fell between us and them.
In the second act, she was lying prostrate on the floor, disrobed of her profane dress, and covered over with a black cloth, while the black figures kneeling round her, chanted a hymn. She was now dead to the world. The sunbeams had faded away, as if they would not look upon the scene, and all the light was concentrated in one great mass upon the convent group.
Again she was raised. All the blood had rushed into her face, and her attempt at a smile was truly painful. She then knelt before the Bishop, and received the benediction, with the sign of the cross, from a white hand with the pastoral ring. She then went round alone to embrace all the dark phantoms as they stood motionless; and as each dark shadow clasped her in its arms, it seemed like the dead welcoming a new arrival to the shades.
But I forget the sermon, which was delivered by a fat priest, who elbowed his way with some difficulty through the crowd to the grating, panting and in a prodigious heat, and ensconced himself in a great arm-chair, close beside us. He assured her that she "had chosen the good part, which could not be taken away from her;" that she was now one of the elect, "chosen from amongst the wickedness and dangers of the world;"—(picked out like a plum from a pie.)
