successor, Father Roux, to St. Louis, although once a week some priest, either Lazarist or secular, gave the Sisters mass and heard their confessions. At this period of depression they experienced great comfort in the presence of Bishop Bruté, who quite unexpectedly visited Kaskaskia, and remained with them several weeks, accepting, in default of a habitable parsonage, an apartment in their bake house, where five or six little orphans lodged. Children and Sisters at this time, it should be borne in mind, were all crowded into one building, two or three children sleeping in each of the cells, while the play-room, besides, had to be turned into a dormitory at night. The Sisters, it will be observed, still had need of their skill in make-shifts; and, as usual, it stood them in good stead. At the south end of the east piazza they put up an awning, and, during the warm weather, used this as their refectory, exchanging it, when the weather grew cool, for one end of the kitchen. Their table consisted of two boards, tacked together, and supported on two barrels, one at each end. Mr. Wm. Morrison's black man, Reuben, was cook, and an excellent one, having served in this capacity on a steamboat. He was a man of tall stature, and always behaved with the utmost dignity and propriety, attending at his post quietly and promptly, without ever appearing flurried by supernumerary demands, and, when all were answered, standing with his hands behind his back, looking towards the reader, and listening with absorbing attention to "Rodriguez," or any other treatise on asceticism selected for the day; from which it was plain to see, if he did not understand the lesson, he perfectly understood the situation. After the Sisters had finished their meal, the children took theirs at the same table, there being no other. The chapel was at the end of the corridor, with the altar over the fire-place, and fronting the door looking down the passage. During mass the Sisters knelt in the cell-doors, and received communion at the chapel door, in which a chair was placed with a communion cloth across the back. The children went to mass on Sundays only, and knelt at the lower end of the passage and on the stairs. Into this temporary chapel Bishop Bruté, during his visit, used to steal, and pass hours before the Blessed Sacrament. The Sisters often met him, his breviary under his arm, going along in silence and on tiptoe, without raising his eyes, or stopping to speak to any

one.

The permanent chapel, the reader must know, was assigned to the brick building, on which, as soon as the plastering in the frame building was done, the masons had got to work once more, and worked this time so diligently that it was roofed-in the same fall, enabling the carpenters in the course of the winter to finish the interior, which, in the following spring, was plastered and painted,

when the whole establishment at last was completed. Meantime, the Sisters were anxious to get into their permanent chapel before Christmas, and the workmen, willing to gratify them, made haste to lay the floor and lath the west end, the other walls being of brick. Plastering, though, was not to be thought of in winter, and the Sisters had to hang up quilts and other coverings to keep out the wind and cold, from which the flooring overhead also helped in some measure to protect them. As fire was indispensable, and there were no bricklayers at hand, Sister Josephine was given the job of laying the hearth. "First filling up the cavity with sand," she says, "I put down the bricks in regular files, to the admiration of all who saw it, and to the joy of those who feared we would freeze there on Christmas night." Yet, on that occasion, in spite of her handiwork, and the roaring fire it supported, the chapel was fearfully cold; and not on that occasion only. For a considerable part of the months of January and February they were obliged to move the altar up close to the fire, and even then to keep the cruets on the hearth until needed at the altar, when the Sister Sacristan put them in reach of the priest; a chafing-dish, withal, was kept on the altar. The convent itself, nominally finished, and wherein all were still packed, was in fact no more weather-proof than the half-finished chapel in the unfinished academy. Framed of unseasoned timbers, and weather-boarded without filling the interspaces, the shrinking of the lumber made wide gaps and crevices, through which the freezing winds swept unchecked. Many of these openings the Sisters stuffed up with tow; but, in rooms where this precaution was not taken, their feet ached with the cold. The music teachers were compelled to keep, under the pianos on which they gave lessons, boxes lined with buffalo skins, in which to wrap the feet. Nearly all the Sisters who had cloaks wore them throughout the day, or at least in the early hours of the morning-at meditation, mass, and the office. Several were obliged to make hoods. and wear them. Sister Catherine Rose one day called them to look at pans on the fire, frozen on one side and stewing on the other. A number of empty cups and pitchers broke from the cold alone. "I, myself," Sister Josephine attests, "in attending a writing class, with two large fires in the room, one in the chimney-place and one in the stove, saw the ink freezing in the children's pens, and felt as if my feet would freeze off from the wind gushing under the washboards." On some of the most intensely cold days, they had to suspend school, for it was as much as the children could do to keep themselves warm hugging around the fire. The Sisters did not attempt to keep water in their cells, as the pitchers would have burst. A lay sister carried some around to each cell, or else a bucketful was placed before the fire in the assembly-room on the

same floor, whither the Sisters went half dressed to perform their ablutions. Basins of water, sitting under the stove from morning to night, were unthawed. Every morning the outer bedclothes. would be covered with a thick frost-the frozen breath of the sleepers; and this frost would not disappear at sunrise, nor yet at noonday, but would generally lie, white and crisp, all day long. As if to crown their discomforts, they were forced to use lard lamps, with wicks of canton-flannel, sperm oil having given out or become very dear, and gas and coal-oil being practically unheardof then. These lard lamps were very inconvenient, and half the time totally unserviceable. They were hard to light and harder to keep burning, going out as soon as the lard congealed, which was almost as soon as they were carried away from the fire, the work of liquefying and lighting anew taking never less than half an hour, and usually more. With all this, the lard, albeit so unsuited to the purpose, was expensive, for which reason the Sisters at night. recreation commonly used a save-all, as they did in old times at Georgetown. Thus bravely they kept up the fight against night and winter till relieved by "the rolling year."

In the spring, as already mentioned, the academy was finished, and they took full possession of their new establishment. But although more comfortably and more monastically fixed, the site was less salubrious than that of the Old Hotel, and the health of the community was not so good as it had been there. The Sisters were nearly all broken down with the intermittent fever, which fastened on its victims with fearful pertinacity. Once attacked, it seemed impossible to get out of its fell grasp. Many became discouraged, and Mother Helen would sometimes burst into tears. when information was brought her of some new one stricken down and put to bed. During the vacation, happening fortunately in the sickly season, scarcely were there Sisters enough up to nurse those who were sick, and fill the offices. As many as three at a time were in danger of death. In one summer four or five received the last sacraments, and two novices made their vows conditionally; but in general the sufferers recovered, to be attacked again upon the least exposure. Subsequently to the removal of the community from the Old Hotel, it buried three professed Sisters, one novice, one postulant, one pupil, one orphan child, and a holy secular man in its service. The latter, a Frenchman, of the name of Bouvet, deserves more than a passing mention. A gentleman by birth, a merchant of St. Louis, and a man of wealth and culture, he voluntarily impoverished himself, giving all his property to the Church. He went to Kaskaskia, where he was not known, and worked as journeyman to a Catholic carpenter, as pious as himself. Finally, he sought and obtained permission to live on

VOL. XI.-4

the premises of the Sisters, never charging them anything for his work, and at his death leaving them his effects, which included a library of French books. In dying the good man asked to be buried under the gateway of the convent cemetery; but this request, made in his humility, the Sisters denied in their reverence, and laid his body in a quiet nook of the cemetery. In the spring of 1837, it should be remarked, the community had made an urgent. application to Georgetown for further assistance, in answer to which Sister Seraphina Wickham volunteered her services, two choir Sisters and a lay sister coming with her. A month after her arrival Sister Seraphina had been elected Superior, and was now, Christmas-tide, 1840, at the head of the community.

The following Christmas was saddened by the death of Sister De Chantal Brawner, who had entered as a postulant in 1836. Sister De Chantel died of typhoid fever, attended with delirium, her sufferings having continued for nine weeks, during which she had been watched by two Sisters night and day, to the exhaustion of the entire community. She was a large woman, of powerful constitution, the very vigor of whose resistance to disease sharpened the pangs of the struggle. Shortly before her death the clouds of delirium parted, and Father St. Cyr, seizing this lucid interval, administered the extreme unction and Viaticum, when darkness closed in upon her again, and she passed, through returning agonies, into the night that knows no morning on the earth. But this dreary Christmas was succeeded by some consolation. On the octave of the Epiphany the Sisters had the happiness of welcoming Bishop Kenrick, then newly-consecrated, and coadjutor to Bishop Rosati, who had been sent as legate or vicar apostolic to Hayti. The new Bishop immediately gave them a chaplain for their convent, and thenceforward they had the blessing of daily mass; in recognition of which they purchased a lot on the other side of the street, and built for their chaplain, Father Heim, a suitable house, wherein, besides living comfortably himself, he might entertain the Bishop when he should visit Kaskaskia. The house of the parish priest, as has been said, was dilapidated, in happy or unhappy unison with the parish church and sacristy, which had fallen into such ruin that the priest sent his best vestments for safe-keeping to the Sisters, who every Sunday and festival day had the vestment for the occasion carried to the church and brought back as soon as the service was over. In the belfry of the old church, to cap the scene, hung the old bell, also in ruins, presented by Louis XV. to the parish of Kaskaskia a century before, and which but the other day, with the consent of the present Bishop of the diocese, was sent to join the more famous relic from Independence Hall at the New Orleans Exhibition, where the cu

rious visitor might have seen, side by side, the first bell that rang for worship in the West and the first that rang for liberty in all the land. After Bishop Kenrick's visit to Kaskaskia, which seems to have sent fresh life coursing through all the ecclesiastical veins and arteries of the old town, it was decided to build a new church and parsonage, and the work was promptly begun, and, with the help of the pastor's own hands, carried so far as the roofing-in and flooring of the church; when, being already used by the needy congregation, it was overtaken by the dire catastrophe to which we now draw near, and which was the end of ecclesiastical things and of nearly every thing else in Kaskaskia.

On May 12th, 1842, Sister Agnes Brent, the first Superior, was again elected, proving the last at Kaskaskia, as well as the first. The next year there was a division of the diocese, whereby Kaskaskia fell under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Chicago; but Bishop Kenrick, unwilling to lose the Visitation nuns altogether, notified Mother Agnes of his desire to establish a house in St. Louis, and requested her to proceed thither as its first Superior. With this request Mother Agnes made up her mind to comply, selecting, as her associates in the undertaking, Sister Beatrice Tyler, Sister Augustine Barber, Sister Josephine Barber, Sister Agatha Russel, and Sister Magdalene Cremur. On the morning of April 14th, 1844, accordingly, they left Kaskaskia for St. Louis, accompanied by two of the pupils and their father, Major Graham, son of the venerable Dr. C. C. Graham, of Louisville, Ky., whose centennial birthday was lately celebrated with so much éclat. A ride of thirty or forty minutes brought them to the bank of the Mississippi, whose waters, they noticed, were high, and still rising-the "little cloud like a man's hand," portending, had they known it, the coming cataclysm; but they did not read the sign. A steamboat upward bound presently heaving in sight, and rounding to at a signal from their party, they went aboard, and in six hours reached St. Louis, and were conveyed to the City Hospital, where for eight days the good Sisters of Charity lavished on them every possible attention and kindness, making those eight days so pleasant as to seem almost days of retreat. In the meantime they rented a house on Sixth street, which was fitting up, and into which some fortnight after their arrival they moved, although, not having a single article of furniture, they could not get settled until cupboards, tables, desks, benches, and the like, were made, and pianos, globes, maps, and all school apparatus and kitchen utensils provided. They were even without bedsteads, and, till these could be got, had to sleep on the floor, the Sisters of Charity lending them pillows. As in the foundation they had left behind them at Kaskaskia, their work began at the beginning.