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VARIA.

nor Hélène Massalski cared more about frippery than did this small Puritan maid. Indeed, Hélène, after one passionate outburst, resigned herself with great good humor to the convent uniform, and turned her alert young mind to other interests and pastimes. If the authenticity of her childish copy-books can be placed beyond dispute, no youthful record rivals them in vivacity and grace. It was the fashion among the older pensionnaires of Notre Dame aux Bois to keep elaborate journals, and the little Polish princess, though she tells us that she wrote so badly as to be in perpetual penance for her disgraceful "tops and tails," scribbled away page after page with reckless sincerity and spirit. She is so frank and gay, so utterly free from pretense of any kind, that English readers, or at least English reviewers, appear to have been somewhat scandalized by her candor; and these innocent revelations have been made the subject of serious diatribes against convent schools, which, it need hardly be said, have altered radically in the past century, and were, at their worst, better than any home training possible in Hélène Massalski's day. And what fervor