[202] The convents are those of the city of Cork, South, opened in 1777, in which is also an asylum for aged women; the city of Cork, North; Bandom, Doneraile, Youghal, Midleton, Fermoy, Michelstown, Limerick, Killarney, Tralee, Dingle, Milltown, Cahirciveen, Millstreet, Listowel, Castleisland, Thurles, attached to which is an industrial school; Cashel, with an orphanage and an industrial school; Fethard, Ballingary, Waterford, Dungarvan, Clonmel, Carrick-on-Suir; Lismore, George's Hill, Dublin; Roundtown, near Dublin, Maynooth, Clondalkin, Lucan, Kilkenny, Castlecomer, Mountcoin, Carlow, Maryborough, Kildare, Bagnalstown, Clane, Stradbally Portarlington, Mount Mellick, Wexford, Enniscorthy, Drogheda, Rahan, Mullingar, Granard, Tuam, Galway, and Banmore.
GRACE SEYMOUR'S MISSION.
In a small village of New England, elm-shaded and far from the resorts of travellers, there lived, a great many years ago, two people in easy circumstances, the owners of a lovely cottage—a father and his only daughter.
They were well descended, and fully showed it; moreover, the girl's mother had been an Englishwoman of high birth, the daughter of a great house which, in the past, had also been allied to that of the man she married. Edward Seymour had once been the pastor and the favorite of the village of Walcot, an upright, believing, uncompromising Calvinist, a kind of Cromwell with all the ambition turned heavenwards, and all the hardness tempered by a warm, generous nature. His wife also had been a vigorous believer in the same theology. Sprung from a family noted for its "Low Church" views in England, she had been strongly interested in the narrative of the American missionary, in the days when he, fresh from the university, and filled with vehement but practical enthusiasm, had gone to the "mother country" on a tour of alms-asking and receiving. From interest sprang attraction; then love, with its impulsive and whole-hearted logic, rushed in and pleaded the cause of the disciple with that of the religion, and suggested forcibly that a fortune thrown at the feet of the minister would eventually find its way to the feet of God. Sweet argument of the heart! though in this case an argument misapplied.
So it fell out that, despite warnings and shakings of heads and holding up of hands, Elizabeth Howard and her fortune (not a princely one, though) crossed the seas, and Edward Seymour presented a fair young foreign enthusiast to his congregation as his beloved and hard-won bride, under the fire of a rude battery of eyes belonging to the startled maidens whose charms had long since (in their own individual minds, at least) been destined for the minister's solace and support. She won her way into the hearts of all, this young English Calvinist, full of pure-hearted sincerity, gentle yet steadfast as "Priscilla, the Puritan maiden," courageous in self-denial that the poor might profit by her privations, a confidant the most unhappy ever found sympathetic, and the most guilty, indulgent. Her husband used to say of her that the Scriptures had never received a more fitting and perfect fulfilment, a more ideal accomplishment of true womanhood, as set forth in the many sentences where wise and holy women are depicted, than Elizabeth had proved herself to be.
In household matters she was no less at home than in those graver concerns of the parish and the soul-life of her husband's spiritual people. A good deal of the old earnestness regarding religious truth remained in the little favored community of Walcot, and serious, intelligent investigation was one of the many sturdy though reverential habits of thought that yet lingered with these world-forgotten villages. To Seymour himself the place was a paradise; the work was not such as to overtax his bodily strength to that degree that leaves but little energy for the intellectual requirements of his calling; neither was the stress upon his imagination so unwholesomely great as it is with too many of his successors, whose brain, in order to froth up according to their Sunday audience's expectations, must be in a moral ferment for the previous six days of the week. His wife, no frivolous gossip to whom tea and petty scandal are dear, no mere drudge from whom household cares have worn away the bloom of poetry and the freshness of early enthusiasm, was to him a living guide, a true helpmate, bearing his burdens and sharing his joys, a gospel-law written in sweetest, most natural human characters, and a most winning, womanly embodiment of the stern and glorious word "Excelsior."
Was it a reward for her many virtues, or a trial for his strong and faithful nature, that God should call her hence, and close the book abruptly which had been to her husband a living commentary on the divine law? Yet it happened so, but not at the outset of their purified love-career; for when Elizabeth Seymour came to die, she saw not only her husband near her, with faith subduing sorrow in his inspired eyes, but two children, one a girl of fifteen, the other a boy of four years, the only ones she had had, but upon whom she had lavished the holy mother-love that would have been intense still for each had her children numbered as many as the sons of Jacob.
Grace—she had been called so because it was through earnest prayer alone that her mother had survived her birth—was holding her father's hand, while his other one and her own were clasped in the dying woman's wasted fingers; and as the little one at her feet pulled unconsciously at her long dress, she felt her heart throb strangely, solemnly, when her mother said: