is in Ireland itself that the system chiefly prevails. There, of course, children in workhouses registered as Catholics are under the spiritual charge of the priest. But the destitution of the people in various parts of Ireland is still great; the number of orphans, from times of famine and scarcity, very great also; and a lady or Scripturereader begging to be allowed to provide for a starving child and to relieve the wants of its relations or those who have given it shelter, is a terrible tempter in a foodless, fireless hovel. It is hard to bear hunger, hard to see one's children hungry, still harder perhaps for the mere relative or neighbour to have to stint herself and her own children in order to support an orphan, when, by surrendering it, she can obtain food for herself and them. Then the hope suggests itself that it need be only for a time, and that the child, now a baby, can be claimed again before it can have lost its faith. Sometimes this hope may be realised; more often, we are afraid, it is otherwise; and the poor little one is either crushed in the process to which it is subjected, or grows up into a Protestant of the fiercest type, a brazenfaced reviler of God's Mother in heaven and God's Vicar on earth, and a very cataract of misapplied texts.

Lord Chesterfield observes of an unbecoming boast: we must hope that the man is a liar, because we should else have to think him a beast;" and, without using such strong language, we unfeignedly hope that there is much exaggeration in the reports that we have been perusing. As we cannot believe, without better evidence than that of Scripture-readers, that Catholics every where "invite them into their houses," and listen with avidity to their expositions, or quite trust the glowing assertions of the Rev. Superintendents of certain regions in the counties of Cork and Kerry, that the majority of the population is awakening to what they call "scriptural truth," so we must be permitted to hope that such statements from the managers of orphanages as, we have the comfort of feeling that none of the children who have been in the nursery, even for a short time, have been known to turn back to the fearful errors of Romanism," must be understood in a Pickwickian sense. Indeed, with regard to that particular prison-house, the managers of which thus express their comfortable feelings, we happen to have the comfort of knowing that several girls who escaped from it are giving consolation by their piety and docility under Catholic instruction. Nevertheless, we are afraid that a very large number do entirely lose their faith, and are ready, like a heroine whose exploits are related at great length in the "Connemara Orphans' Nursery" Report, to brave both priest and parents, and when the father tries to bring them back from the house of a Scripture-reader, to "lock the door against

him, and lecture him well from the inside;" and so enable the reader to chuckle over the thought "that Julia has the root of the matter in her, and is a girl of prayer." We know from the reports of that noble institution, St. Brigid's Orphanage at Dublin, that all the 570 orphans received by it up to last December were, with scarcely an exception, rescued from the very hands of proselytisers-from whom they could not have been delivered if that shelter had not been open to them-and that they were selected as the most necessitous from three times that number of applicants who were mostly exposed to the same danger.

Our readers will be aware by this time that the Birds'-nests into which we have been trying to peep are Protestant establishments in Ireland, in which Catholic children are sedulously trained in heresy. We should have preferred calling them bird-cages; for those who are rescued from them, before their original warble of faith has been exchanged for a parrot-chatter of hymns and texts, exhibit the same sort of delight at their escape as a blackbird or thrush that has succeeded in getting out of its cage. Or if the title of "nest” must be retained, we should consider "cuckoo's nest" more appropriate than “bird's nest," as better representing some peculiarities of Protestant teaching, which even our friends of "the most recent phase of Tractarianism," who are taking such immense pains to imitate the nightingale's notes, cannot altogether prevent being heard through their falsetto, but which in these nests are unmitigatedly and unceasingly resonant. It might hint also at the cuckoo-like establishment of Protestantism in England and Ireland by seizing on the nests of singing-birds, and murdering or banishing those who refused to adopt the cuckoo cry. But in the nests of which we are treating a different and still worse process, as we have seen, is adopted, and one to which we do not know that natural history furnishes a precedent. The cuckoos steal young birds, and teach them by long practice to imitate their own discordant notes, and take care not to let them leave the nest till every vestige of their former melody has disappeared, while the poor mother, Philomelalike,

"sub umbra

Amissos queritur fœtus."

Our deliberations, however, were ended on reading the following "note" in a report of one of various proselytising dépôts in Dublin: "It is important that our friends should remember that the Lukestreet Female Dormitory is not only a shelter for regular inmates, but also for all the girls, of whatever age, who are to be sent on to the 'Bird's Nest,' or the Spiddal, or Galway Orphan Refuges." We

thought it important that Catholics, as well as "friends," should remember this; since it shows, what it was probably intended that the initiated only should understand from it, that even the most apparently harmless institutions under Protestant management in Dublin may be bird-traps to supply the "nests." Catholics might be asked to contribute to a night-refuge for young women, and might naturally enough comply, although the managers were Protestants, knowing that in the only Catholic refuge of the sort in London Protestants and Catholics are sheltered indiscriminately, and nothing is said or done to interfere with the religious convictions of the former; and might have no suspicion that in what professes to be a dormitory Catholic girls of all ages are received in order to be forwarded to some Protestant orphanage, whither it is difficult to trace them, and whence it is still more difficult to extricate them. But this passage (which, by the way, is omitted in a later report) besides suggesting these and other reflections, induced us to acquiesce in the title, which the most zealous in the work of perverting Catholic orphans have given honoris causa to that one of their orphanages in which the process is supposed to be most successfully carried on. We proceed, then, to give some account of "The Bird's Nest" KaT' ¿çox, and of some similar institutions, chiefly in Dublin, to which the name may be given generically. We entreat our readers to reflect what must be the effect on the minds of Catholics in Ireland, already burdened with the huge Protestant Church Establishment, to see many thousands of pounds sent over every year from England for the express purpose of maintaining institutions the only object of which is to make bitter Protestants of Catholic children. In the discussions that have been so frequent lately on the questions of Irish grievances and Irish disaffection, is it not strange that this grievance has not been touched on?

The Bird's Nest. This was founded as a testimonial to the late Miss Whately. The managers either do not print any reports, or take care that they shall be circulated only among those who can be thoroughly trusted. Several persons have been trying in vain to procure one. We have obtained, however, a much more complete one than the committee would be likely to publish, from our own "Special Correspondent," a very trustworthy and intelligent lady, who visited the establishment last month. The building is large and handsome; it is about ten minutes' walk from the Kingstown railway station. The playground is surrounded by an unusually high wall; and the dormitories are furnished with what is equally unusual, except in prisons-strong doors with iron bars for external fastenings. A few children have at times managed, notwithstanding, to escape from

the nest. The following conversation, which passed between our informant and the matron, will show the thoroughness of the system here carried on:

"Have you any Roman Catholic children here?"

"O yes-they are all Roman Catholics." The number at the time was 156, of whom between 30 and 40 were boys.

"Have their parents turned Protestants?"

"No. Perhaps one or two may be converts, but not more." "Do the parents object to the children being brought up Protestants?"

"It would be of no use if they did; for they know it will be done, when they bring them here." This, by the way, must have been an euphemistic expression for letting them be taken there, or not being able to get them out.

"What is the reason that the parents send their children here?” "Principally poverty. Some have lost their husbands, or have been deserted, and have other children to support, and are glad to be relieved of one."

"Have you any difficulty in getting the Roman Catholic religion out of these children's heads?"

"Yes, the greatest, sometimes; but it is our first endeavour; all our efforts are directed towards it: controversy is the first lesson of the school, and the children become such first-rate controversialists, that no one could answer them."

"Because, when they go out, they will meet Roman Catholics; and we wish them to have a thorough knowledge of Romanist errors as well as of the truth."

It is not necessary to make any comment; but if any Protestant spoke without indignation of such a system, we should like to ask him, if Catholics were to take charge of 150 children,-every one of whom was the child of Protestant parents, and of parents who were well known to desire that their children should follow their own religion, and had parted with them only under the pressure of starvation, and were then to make it their first endeavour, to which all their efforts were directed, to turn every one of these children not only into a Catholic, but into a Catholic controversialist, how long would it be before the building was pulled down? There is another feature of The Bird's Nest which we shrink altogether from characterising, but the bearing of which on the work of perversion will be understood by every one who knows any thing of the beautiful delicacy of Irish Catholic girls, and of the danger of recklessness about religion that attends any serious wound inflicted on it. We are

assured by our informant that the boys and girls not only walk out together, but play promiscuously, and that she herself saw big boys and girls romping with one another in the playground. But this is not all. The boys' and girls' lavatories, which are on the groundfloor, looking into the playground, open into each other, and the single bath in the establishment is in that of the boys. Three of the dormitories open into each other: the first and last are occupied by the older girls, the middle one by infants of both sexes, whose age may be inferred from the fact that it is one of the rules not to admit a child under four or five. There was no bed in either of the dormi

tories for a superintendent.

Well-barred doors to shut the children

in together seem all that is considered essential.

Still, although the children cannot easily run away, it often happens that the parents discover their mistake, or repent of their sin in parting with them, and try to get them back again. Against this provision has to be made. Perhaps our readers in England may not have heard of the Rooneys of Drumsna in the County of Leitrim, whose case became public by being brought before the Queen's Bench. A kind benefactress, Lady Mary King, had relieved her of three daughters, and sent them for greater security all the way to The Bird's Nest. When the poor mother, who had applied in vain for her children, persisted in demanding them, she received the following letter and documents:

"MRS. ROONEY,-I was much surprised at getting a letter from you this morning. It would have been the right thing to have let me know you were going to town to take your children. Had you let me know your intention, I would have told you that you would not get them without my order, as you know you solemnly gave them up to me before a magistrate and in the presence of witnesses, and also that you must pay their expenses at the institution. I now send an order for you to get them, on paying what has been laid out on them. If you intended to take back your children, I wonder you never sent me a message to that effect before you went away. I have had messages from other parties, but none from you; and after all the kindness I have shown you and B., I think you have not acted well. M. KING.

"Charlestown, Drumsna, Nov. 10, 1863."

"To the Matron of The Bird's Nest.

"Nov. 19, 1863.

"MADAM,—Please to give Mrs. Rooney her children on paying

you the expenses incurred for them.

"Charlestown, Drumsna."

MARY KING.