Mungo Park walked on in the belief, absurd as he knew it to be, that he had died. There are catastrophes (so he assured himself) where the victim need not add to his perplexity the pain of suspending his judgment. And this hypothesis was some relief to him here and now—if, as in his anguish he thought, it is here and now. He dismissed as impertinent his own critical question : when did it happen and where and how?

One thing at a time, he answered himself. For he wanted no more than a mind sufficiently at ease to draw inferences from the evidence of his bewildered senses. He did not deny that he felt well. All his reactions were perfect; he had no physical pain; his breathing was right; there was not the least irritation on any part of his skin; no blister, fly-bite, soreness; his clothes, hat, boots seemed ideally part of himself. His stick hung on his wrist; he could hear his watch ticking; he .verified, by touching the places, that his many pockets held their expected contents.

A peasant proprietor had two sons. The elder was impressed for military service and sent to America, where he had to remain for many years. On his return he found his father dead and his brother rich in the possession of all the family property. He went, therefore, to his brother’s house, and to his question, ‘Don’t you know me?’ he received for reply only a surly ‘No.’ When he humbly made himself known, his brother told him to go to the granary, and there in the loft he would find an old chest, which was all his father had left him in his will; and with that the uncouth brother turned on his heel and left him without further welcome.

Our traveller, therefore, went up to the loft and found there only an old worm-eaten chest. ‘What in the world,’ said he to himself, ‘can I do with this rotten old box? However, blessed be the will of God ! it will perhaps do to make a fire with,’ for it was winter and extremely cold. He, therefore, put it on his back and, returning to his lodgings, borrowed an axe, and, as he was chopping it up, he came on a piece of paper which was behind a secret sliding panel at the bottom. He took it up and, reading it, found it to be a receipt for a large sum of money deposited on loan by his father. On presentation the sum was given up to him, so that now he was rich.

(St. Mary’s Loch from Megget Water Bridge, January.)

Lean evenly, white pool of light, before the spirit held intent, each power of sense impelled into one point of sight; no radiance on the glassy face or aught created eyes the vision holds, absorb, embrace; so all in silence lies.

The eyes behold a hundredfold a million ripples lap inaudibly upon a lap delicious curves enfold; around the water’s sinuous verges where the meek hills loll felicitously intermerges long lines’ rhythmic roll.

In a bright vault stand little clouds immobilized by frost, which yesterday were rolled and tossed and dragged in ragged shrouds. Hushed is the wild and rainy west before the tender north, to still the scene for one rough guest whom chance has driven forth;

round whom, attentive, motionless, each happily unseen in his impenetrable screen of leaves which once twigs dress; from odorous moor and windy height and opalescent haze like planets on a starry night all those spirits gaze.

John Gray.

If we except the domain of the Soviets, where the schismatic church is in fetters, the small ancient dependencies of Portugal and France, the struggling missions in Japan, China, India, the Malayan States and Islands, Persia, and Asia Minor, nearly the whole of the vast and densely-populated Orient is still immersed in the darkness of error, still aloof from the Christian Faith. There is, however, one bright spot in this all-pervading gloom, one polity which can distinctly claim for itself the title of Christian, one centre in union with the Apostolic See which radiates the light of truth among the pagan nations surrounding it.

The Philippines, which are said to comprise more than seven thousand islands, though only some ten or twelve of these are of considerable size, possess more than eight million Catholics in a population of say ten million. The largest island, Luzon, about the size of Great Britain, is almost entirely Catholic and contains the famed harbour of Manila, capital of the islands and the seat of government. It was in March, 1521, that the Portuguese navigator Magellan on his way back from South America—he has given his name to the straits separating Tierra del Fuego from the rest of that Continent—disembarked at Mindanao, the second largest island of the archipelago, and caused the first Mass to be celebrated there on the 30th of the same month. He himself died on the following 27th of April in the island of Mactan. Forty years later Philip II, after whom the name Philippines, husband of Mary Tudor, decided to annex the islands to Spain and despatched a fleet which set sail from Mexico under the command of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and arrived at Leyte, one of the islands, in the early spring of 1565.

The sub-title of this work is ‘A study in the Counter-Reformation,’ and this indicates its real importance. As Mr. Evennett remarks, the unfortunate name ‘Counter-Reformation’ invites a disastrous over-simplification’: it was not a mere reaction to the ‘Reformation’ —another misnomer—it was a most complex movement’ : it was ‘essentially a hybrid.’ The present volume deals with that curious and interesting group of moderate men—among whom the Cardinal of. Lorraine is the most significant figure —that became a vital centre in France during the period between the election of Pius IV, December, 1559, and ‘the moment when the Fathers at Trent turned their attention to serious considerations in April, 1562.’ The movement culminated and broke down in the Colloquy of Poissy, and petered out in the Conference of Saverne. It was a lost cause—at least in its eirenic projects—but while it lasted it was ‘one of the gravest crisis for Catholicism,’ and its effect can be felt in the attitude of the French hierarchy in the ensuing sessions of Trent.

The Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles de Guise, Archbishop of Rheims, was regarded by contemporary Protestants as a sinister and untrustworthy person, and later historians have, on the whole, endorsed their view. This attitude is probably in great part due to the permanent inability of the Nonconformist mind to appreciate any greatness that is rich and diverse and unconfined to one single fanatical aim. Mr. Evennett, completing the work of M. Romier, has succeeded in rehabilitating the Cardinal’s character.

On the day of the Fête-Dieu or Corpus Christi in Saint-Malo and the surrounding district known locally as the Clos-Poulet, the windows of all the confectioners’ shops, large and small, are heaped with little bags of dragées or sugared almonds, known (on this occasion only) as Cornets-de-la-Saint-Jean. Till recently it was also the custom to sell them in the streets, when from early morning the cry could be heard:

‘Les cornets de la-Saint-Jean,

Pour les petits et pour les grands,

A chacun pour son argent . . .’

—and there were few who could not spare a few sous to buy them, if only to give away to the children. But as their name indicates, these cornets do not really belong to the festival at all and were only transferred to it when la-Saint-Jean fell more or less out of observance; in earlier days it was on the 24th of June that they made their appearance, and if one goes back further their origin is as interesting as it is remote. For the Cornets-de-la-Saint-Jean have a history that dates back some six hundred years, and they are all that is left to-day—these gay and gilded little ‘pokes’ of sugared almonds—of a very ancient and noble Confraternity.

It was somewhere about the year 1240 that, under the auspices and with the support of the Bishop Geoffroi, the Confraternité des Frères-Blancs de Saint-Jean was first founded at Saint-Malo; and there still exist very precise details of its earlier years in certain ancient MSS, some of which (originals or copies) are now preserved in the archives of the town.

‘When Colin March, a younger son of the famous diplomatist, played in a British Embassy garden abroad, his foreign nurse gave him a tortoise. “A useful beast,” she explained, “it devours cockroaches; they are its passion.” Colin wanted to see this beneficent passion at work. So he captured one of the Embassy’s many cockroaches and put it down in front of the tortoise’s nose, like an early Christian presented to a lion. The tortoise eyed the offered feast, and mused deeply. The cockroach did not muse. It was a cockroach of action. Without any apparent need for reflection it bolted for cover, like a flash of blackness, right into the tortoise’s shell, and hid itself in that profounder thinker’s armpit.

‘The cadet of a dynasty of ambassadors was charmed with the cockroach’s wit. He filed the whole affair in a pigeon-hole of his ‘cute little mind. As he grew up, he would often chuckle to think of it. Piquant parallels would occur to him. For a fox to go to earth under the kennels, for landsmen to put to sea to escape from a press-gang, for cannon-fodder to hide at the back of the cannon—this was the wisdom of life put into a kind of practical epigram, salt and impudent.’

How did our Catholic forefathers live in penal days? Was life an unceasing nightmare? Was every other man they met a Topcliff? After the death of Elizabeth it would seem that persecution went by fits and starts. The protracted negotiations for the Spanish marriage, from 1617 to 1623, meant a decided lull in active measures against recusants, though when those negotiations were broken off there was a recrudescence of brutality. It was the same after the ill-fated rebellion of 1715, and a milder outbreak recurred in the Lord George Gordon riots. But such happenings tell us little of the ordinary life of Catholics at the time when persecution was not active.

A great deal of material is at hand now in the publications of the Catholic Record Society, also in several volumes brought out by Mr. John Orlebar Payne. As we peruse these records many curious facts emerge. Apostasies were, of course, numerous. This was inevitable when life became more and more burdensome day by day. Still it is sad to read that whereas in the year 1750 the Catholic congregation at Upton in Berkshire totalled ninety-eight exclusive of the members of the principal family there—Perkins— ‘it is curious to notice how many of the families whose names are there given still exist in the neighbourhood, although there is not now a single Catholic among them.’ The sequestration of estates was hard to bear and there is pathos in the will of John Purcell, of the Hays in Shropshire, who in 1729 said : ‘My will and desire is that the penal statutes be never taken against my mother or any of my brothers and sisters except my brother-in-law Thomas Penson so long, that is, as they do not seek to secure more than the annuities allowed them.’

Among the many treasures of St. Edmund’s College, Ware, are a number of old Catholic Prayer-Books. Their preservation is mainly due to the zeal and insight of Father Raymund Stanfield. Amongst them is a copy of the famous old Manual: A Manual of Prayers and Litanies: Distributed according to the Days of the Week. With other Excellent Devotions fitted for all Persons and Occasions. Last Edition much corrected. Permissu Superiorum, 1688. It is a 12mo. volume, singularly compact though actually containing no less than 564 beautifully printed pages. From the foreword ‘To the Pious Reader’ we learn that the present edition is ‘purg’d from many, both gross Errata’s in the Print, and improprieties in the Translations’; the Hymns are ‘rendered according to the Corrected Latin of P. Urban VIII (now generally used in the Church), and those too in far more Musical Numbers.’

The Calendar which follows is peculiarly interesting. In January alone twenty British Saints are commemorated or their feasts kept; in February twenty-two; in March twenty-seven; in April twenty-six, and so on.

At two things stands my mind amazed, But a third costs my heart its glee :

A woman by a woman praised,

A good poor man to honour raised,

And Christ dead on his Mother’s knee.

Vincent McNabb, O.P.

The town of Saint-Malo is well known to the tourists who land there on their way to Paramé or Dinard or the remoter summer haunts of Lower Brittany. Well known at least externally, and as to its more obvious features—the old walls, the single pointing spire, the great castle of the Duchess Anne, the beautiful surrounding waters—but scarcely at all beyond these. And yet there is much to know for those who care to look for it; a whole world, as it were, of history, of tradition, of by-ways that lead into a rather wonderful past.

There is, for instance, a very ancient and picturesque quarter not far from the Cathedral, yet only to be reached by twisting alleys and narrow lanes, where you will pass by the Cour La Houssaye; this is no more than a widening of the way, a little airier than its surroundings, perhaps, but not so important as its name would convey. Yet here stands the House of the Duchess Anne, where she lodged before she carried the white Ermines of Brittany into the shield of France; a haunted place, as the old grandmothers will tell you, with its ancient walls, its turret stair and the window whence she saw the Rider on the White Horse .... but that is another story and not the one that I wish to tell you to-day. So we will pass on and, threading these tortuous ways, come presently to a narrow quiet street at the end of which stands the House of the Dames-de-Saint-Aaron and behind it the little chapel—very rarely open to visitors—which is the real core and heart of the city, and to every Malouin, doubly, trebly, sacred ground.