In the establishment of the sisters of Our Lady of Thirty-Six Sorrows, you sleep in attic dormitories; you are fed meagrely on scraps of meat and spoiled vegetables, and you pay twenty-five sous a day to the institution. That is to say, the sisters withhold twenty-five sous from your wages, when they have secured a place for you. They call that getting you a place for nothing. Further, you have to work from six o'clock in the morning until nine in the evening, like the inmates of prisons. You are not allowed to go out. Meals and religious exercises take the place of recreation. Ah! the good sisters do not bore themselves, as M. Xavier would say; and their charity is a famous trap. They rope you in finely! But there it is,— I shall be stupid all my life. The stern lessons of experience, the succession of misfortunes, never teach me anything, are of no use to me. I am always crying out and raising a row, but in the end I am always victimized by everybody.
Several times comrades had spoken to me of the sisters of Our Lady of Thirty-Six Sorrows.
"Yes, my dear, it seems that only very swell people come to the box, . . . countesses, . . . marchionesses. One may chance on astonishing places."
I believed it. And then, in my distress, I remembered with some feeling, booby that I am, the happy years that I spent with the little sisters
