ONLY LAST MONTH I had occasion to call attention to the sudden departure of our solid and heretofore decent contemporary, the Atlantic Atlantic Monthly, into the domain of the yellow journal. The cause of my animadversions at that time was a villainous, cheap, hysterical yarn told by one little Penrhyn Lee to me unknown. It is bad enough when nobodies make their bread and butter by scribbling putrid stories about religion, but it becomes galling to find "great guns" like Conan Doyle -descending to those dirty levels in quest (one would suppose, unnecessarily) of dramatic raw material.

Conan knows better; he should also know that a large percentage of his delighted readers belong to that church which, in one of his latest stories he wantonly villifies by making use of the worm-eaten theme of the love of a nun for a priest, and the eternal motive of "disappointed love" being the source of vocation to the religious life. In his tale entitled "The Confession," Dr. Doyle plunges like any penny-a-liner hack into the slimy and mock-tragic regions usually exclusively in the possession of the disreputable panderers to the vicious in literature.

His "plot" has done service for five hundred years and should be permanently retired on a pension.

A priest-needless to say, a Jesuit and a Spaniard-has been giving the Dominican nuns of a convent in Lis

bon their annual retreat. The Abbess of these "gentle fanatics" was endowed with many virtues and a "wax like face." She was very good to sinners in spite of her "cold and serene" look, and the worst wretches whom she helped caught at times a look in her remarkable eyes which showed plainly that "there was no depth" to which the Abbess "had not been before them."

Then Padre Garcia turns up to give the retreat.

The Abbess goes to confession and discovers that the Jesuit is none other than her long lost Pedro. This is cheap enough--and threadbare; but listen to what follows! (Our friend Penryhn Lee will have to mind his laurels and work hard on his next revelation of horrors, for Conan Doyle is pressing at his bloody heelprints). How is this for Dr. Doyle? "A convulsed face;" "terrible eyesso full of hungry longing and hopeless despair!" The padre didn't know that his Julia had taken the veil. "What was there left for me to do?" asks Julia, since Pedro jilted her!

Explanations. It appears that a kerosene lamp was to blame. But for that fateful lamp Pedro would never have become Father Garcia, nor beautiful Julia the Abbess Monica with the wax face. On a certain evening they had arranged that she would put this plaguey lamp at her window, which romantic proceeding would give Mr. Pedro, mooning in

the Plaza below, to understand that she "wished him to be true to her." She failed to place the lamp there, he says. She says she did. More explanations. He thought her window was the "third at the top." No! It was the first at the top. Treachery somewhere. Wicked cousin Alphonso had put up a job on Pedrobeing in love with Julia himself. When the priest hears this "two clawlike hands flew up into the air with a horrible spasm of hatred," etc., etc.

He will NEVER forgive!!!

The Abbess advises forgiving, but the Padre sums up the wonderful philosophy of this sulphurous tale, by asking the holy religious: "What

about our wasted lives!" He had "wasted" his at the altar, and she in works of mercy!

Oh, Conan, Conan! how art thou fallen! And why didn't you tell us what became of Cousin Alphonso? Odds that he did not waste his precious career, but went on sensibly and usefully monkeying with oil lamps, to the confusion of his enemies and the satisfaction of his own honest, worldly, unreligious self. Conan Doyle is a great writer.

POOR SPAIN !

The Cardinal Archbishop of Valladolid has recently stirred up a tremendous wave of emotion and anxiety by a Pastoral Letter which he published anent the crisis in Cuba and the growing seriousness. of conditions in Spain itself.

Cardinals are not apt to fly off incontinently into injudicious and unwarranted pronunciamentoes; wherefor these sad, strong words possess a very deep significance:

"If it should be proved that this state of affairs is due to the causes which affect moral order and integrity of conscience, there will be bitter lamentations and cries of indignation from all persons of worth demanding before God and man the most terrible punishment for the traitorous authors of so many calamities.

"Sad, very sad, is the description we have just given, but it is the sad truth that there is weighing upon us in one of our colonies a fatal war, which is carrying off without glory the bloom of Spanish youth; that we are seriously threatened with international complications which may involve us in another war still more disastrous; that our national wealth is ruined, our policy vacillating and indecisive, our commerce destroyed, our industry in its death throes, our agriculture at its last gasp, and that our people, with their energies, their blood, and their money wasted in a sterile struggle, and with confidence lost in their rulers, have abandoned themselves to the weakness of despair.

"Every one recognizes that the present situation of Spain is the most critical the country has traversed in the present generation, and is only comparable with that which preceded the French invasion at the beginning of the century. Every one recognizes that outside of our own country a tempest threatens us, and that within a volcano rages under our feet."

THOMAS WALSH, whose verses have appeared from time to time in this magazine, and who, to my thinking, has a truer note than any other of the new writers, was last month called William Walsh in these pages-how or why the (printer's) devil alone knows. I am almost glad of the mistake because it gives me a chance to speak of Mr. Walsh. His muse is freighted with an antique stateliness, and sonorous dignity. You will recall, perhaps, his exquisite piece entitled, "A Panel After Turner,"-a bit of rare coloring, and quaintly, deftly done.

I only wish that more of this young singer's songs might come to me. Alas! the secular magazines prove all too tempting to all our writers who rise to something truly great and strong.