Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/50

 confirmed at our parish church. As the great organ was pealing all through the building when the girls first entered it, a cold shiver ran through them, because, as they said, it seemed like entering a playhouse on the Sabbath. My wife, however, succeeded in laughing them out of this nonsense, as she called it. But, alas, for those area stairs in our city houses, so useful to pass food to the body, they facilitate also poison to the soul. Two Catholic sisters, on a conversion mission, found their way down. They were gentleness and meekness personified. When they exhorted to pray preferentially to the Holy Virgin, who, as Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, had more influence for people's good or ill than any other member of the Godhead; when they expatiated further on the all but super-mortal Infallible earthly Head of their only true Church; and finally upon everlasting fire in reserve hereafter for all who refused to be saved through the Catholic Church, the girls were at last reconverted; and as they had to attend mass by stealth, for fear of losing their places, they became all the more zealous about their new faith.

But now opens another and final scene in this little drama. One of the girls is taken seriously ill. She had caught severe cold some time before, in attending a protracted midnight revival meeting, to bring in the new year; and now a galloping consumption had set in, and the young life must so prematurely close. Deathbeds were always Gray's grand opportunity. He contrived to gain access to' the patient, and when the excitement and alarm, into which he succeeded in throwing her, threatened immediately fatal results, he was only all the more pressing to secure the con-