vanced. The counsel of GOD, however, overruled this plan of man's devising, and reserved the honour of receiving her body and rejoicing in her patronage, for a small city on the shores of the Ligurian Bay, now the Gulph of Genoa. It so happened that at this time, many of the faithful servants of Christ, had concealed themselves from the persecution, and were lying hid in dens and caverns of the isle. Among these were Benenatus, a priest; Subaudus; and Apollinarius, a deacon, who were warned by a vision, that they should remove the body of the blessed Saint from thence. Having therefore consulted a faithful pilot, named Gratianus, and gathering a company of virgins, who, like themselves, had hitherto escaped the tyrant's wrath, they took away her body, and put it on board a vessel they launched, which had been drawn up upon the shore. They there embalmed it with sweet spices, and having put to sea, directed their course to Africa. GOD, however, otherwise intended it. For the wind blowing a storm from the south, raised a heavy sea against them, which ran mountains high. The bark also which lay so long dry upon the shore, opened its seams, and let in water on every side. They toiled therefore all night without making any way, while their utmost exertions were required at the pump, in endeavouring to keep the water from rising in the hold. They carried however precious freight in the body of the Saint, and with little change, the language of Cæsar to the pilot when crossing the Adriatic in a storm, might be addressed to their pilot: "Quid times? Martyrem vehis atque fortunam." For when morning dawned, a heavy sleep suddenly seizing hold on the pilot Gratianus, as he found himself quite overpowered by it, he said to the priest Benenatus, "Rise, my lord; take the helm for a little, while I take a little rest.” No sooner had he given way to slumber, than the virgin Deivota seemed to appear to him in his sleep, and rousing him up, said, "Rise, pilot Gratianus, for the tempest being lulled, you will soon have a calm sea; the water will no longer fill your bark, nor waves beat high against its side." She then directed him and the priest Benenatus to observe a dove which would issue from her mouth, and following its flight, steer to a place in Greek called lonely, for there her body was to be deposited. On this, Gratianus having awoke, they did as the vision directed them; and guided by the flight of the dove, which went before them, they came to a place on the Ligurian bay in Italy called Monocus or Monicus, now Monaco, signifying in Greek "The Lone Dwelling." There, in a retired valley, where the dove alighted from her flight, the body of the martyred virgin was deposited, attended by the priest Benenatus, the deacon Apollinarius, and that choir of virgins who rejoiced in thus honouring the remains of their blessed sister, who had so manifestly proved the prevalency of her intercession in thus procuring deliverance for themselves from the storm of persecution, the fury of the winds, and the tempest-tossed billows of the sea. What indeed must have been the feelings of that holy company, as in that lonely valley, beneath the snow-clad summits of the towering Alps, they poured forth their thanksgivings to Almighty GoD, while they circled the sacred body of the spouse of Christ, invested with a hallowed dignity, as a precious seed which is to be raised in immortality at the general day of resurrection. Victor in the last conflict, she had triumphed over the tyranny of man and Satan's rage combined; and she who, in the timidity of her sex, would have shrunk from combat with the weakest of her human foes, had now, through JESUS Christ her Lord, proved more than conqueror of th arch-enemy of souls himself, and all his host. She had fought the fight, she had won the amaranthine crown which decked her virgin brows, when, bearing the palm branch of victory, she joined that glorious company of Saints who are gladdened by the presence of the Lamb, as they walk in the paradise of their GOD. Herself a martyr, it was meet that her last rites should be paid, and solemn service sung, by a chosen band of Confessors, who, like her, had preserved their loyalty unstained to Christ. Rather than renounce it, they had sought the desert and the cave; and now, after escaping the perils of the sea, were exiles from their homes on the shores of a foreign land. Her feast is kept at Monaco the 27th of January, the day her body was deposited there. On that day the bishop of Nice, within whose diocese Monaco is situate, comes over to celebrate pontifical high mass, at which the inhabitants of the district rejoicingly assist. Monaco lies at the mouth of the gulph of Genoa, and is sheltered by the Alps that rise behind from the cold winds of the north. Its climate is, therefore, almost tropical, and hence its little territory abounds in the fruits belonging to those regions. Though confined within narrow boundaries, and limited in its population, yet, during the lapse of so many centuries, thousands and tens of thousands have there been born, and lived and died, who have been taught to lisp the name of Deivota in their infant devotions, or in the prime of adult years have honoured her as a faithful patroness, through whose protection their little State had maintained independence for so many hundred years, and had again and again been preserved from the arms of the invader, as for example in the years 1507, 1547, 1586, though assailed by the power of a mighty kingdom. And in the faltering accents of old age, how many bowed beneath the weight of years have commended themselves to her intercession, to obtain the grace of a happy death through the redeeming blood of Him for whom she gladly had poured out her own. And thou, Saint Deivota, about fifteen centuries and a half have now rolled on since thou hast gone to swell the ranks of that glorious army of martyrs which is enrolled on high,-yet still fresh as ever in the perennial youth and bloom of immortality. Age has not chilled the ardour of thy charity, abated the vigour of thine intercession, or diminished aught from thy favour and influence with thy GOD. May then thy prayers ascend for him who feebly pens this record of thy martyrdom, that he may be preserved stedfast in the faith of JESUS here, and made partaker of His glory hereafter. Amen. "Devoted to thy GOD from earliest years, Feast of St. Francis Xavier, Apostle of the THE CHAMBER OF DEATH. W. S. S. How stern yet wholesome a moral is deducible from the contemplation of that not less awful because daily scene, the last illness and death-bed of a fellow being! It is not, however, a fleeting and cursory visit to the sick chamber that suffices to bring it properly VOL. III. 2 home to the mind, but it must be that degree of attendance upon the closing moments of a life which men are only induced to give from motives of friendship or consanguinity, and which enables, or indeed compels, them to take an analytic and deliberate view of all the circumstances that mark the final hours of human existence. Thus, and thus only, are we enabled to watch the gradual decay of physical and mental faculty that heralds the great change, and contemplating in another the fate that awaits ourselves, arrive at the full, humiliating, and yet salutary consciousness of human nature's fleeting and utter insignificance! It was under the influence of such, and similar reflections, that, summoned to the bedside of a friend, in whom the symptoms of a long and deeply-seated disease had at length assumed a character of imminent danger to life, we gazed upon features from which sickness and suffering had banished the well remembered and joyous smile that had been wont to lighten them, and from the vacant stare, the haggard look, the mortal languor, became too plainly convinced that death had set his seal upon one who had been to us the well-loved associate of many a past and pleasant hour. With countenances ominous of a hopeless case, physicians had been pacing to and fro between the sick chamber and the room where they sate in consultation; in the very tramp of their heedless, heavy feet, on the staircase, imagination might have traced the professional unconcern of those paid heralds of evil tidings. They leave the house; having pronounced, as it were, sentence of death on its devoted master; and hope, which, before their visit, had been still jocund and buoyant, droops her now shivered wing. Then might be seen the tender wife, till now unconscious of her husband's danger, ministering to all his wants with redoubled earnestness, and vainly striving beneath an appearance of forced placidity, to veil the anguish that tears her soul. With magnanimous effort she forces back to their deep source the tears that rush unbidden to her eyes, though her very heart-strings crack in the effort to wear that ghastly semblance of self-composure. By occasional broken words of grateful recognition the sick man feebly acknowledges the attentions of which he is the object, and faintly endeavours to express his wants; his glazed eye, and wandering sentences and manner, too plainly indicating the progressive obscuration of the thinking faculty, and stealthy inroad of the destroyer. Night comes on;—no season now of rest either for the sinking patient, or the anxious and sorrow ing few that prepare to hold friendly vigil in his dying chamber. Hour after hour steals past, only marked by the periodical administration of prescribed remedies, and the occasional interchange of half-smothered voices giving expressions to such hopes or fears as the alternate restlessness or repose of the sick man may for the moment suggest. Of those watchers at the bedside of death, there is one alone whom during that live-long night, no momentary inclination to slumber tempts or overcomes, for stronger than nature herself, is the wakeful tenderness of a wife's heart! We remember an incident to which not a shadow of real importance could attach, and which yet involuntarily thrilled on our minds like a portent. A servant presented himself at the bed-room door to answer the call of a bell which no person had pulled! This might be explained in half-a-dozen natural fashions, all of which at that dead hour of night, by the couch of the dying man, distempered imagination felt disinclined to adopt.-But morning breaks! He breathes more softly, he sleeps,-and his slumber is tranquil as that of infancy! Too sanguine hope revives, and builds upon symptoms of transient improvement, promises never to be realized! Smiling through her tears, the fond wife clings with too complacent selfindulgence to thoughts which portend the possible realization of her most ardent prayers. Grouped round the blazing fire, the night watchers for the first time exchanged words of more encouraging and cheering import, and venture once more to speak of past and future hours of social pleasantness in which he whose slumber seems so placid has played, and may again enact so chief a part. Sunlight at last streams into that dreary chamber, and the arrival of the physicians is eagerly, yet nervously anticipated. Will they confirm the hopes so recently encouraged, or quench them at once in the bud? Alas! their dictum but registers heaven's own decree! the freedom from pain, the delusive calm that thereon ensues, are but the two unfailing indications of a crisis in the malady, from which all the human art in the world cannot avert a fatal and speedy termination, The resources of medicine are at a standstill, its baffled ministers forsake the house, unable even to keep at bay its master's doom. A clergyman of the established Church now obeyed the summons which had been sent to him, and at the bedside of the sinking patient, impressively delivered the prayers set apart in the Protestant formulary for the visitation of the sick, concluding them by the administration of the sacrament to the dying man, and to such |