act short dialogues in their choirs, richly attiring them with men and women's apparel, especially upon Midsummer's day and the eight days before their Christmas, which is so gallantly performed that many factious strifes and single combats have been, and some were in my time, for defending which of these nunneries most excelled in music and in the training up of children."
Such is a picture drawn by a candid writer of one of the most devout Catholic cities in the world, where licentiousness and papacy went hand in hand until they reached that extreme point of corruption, that, as in the case of Sodom, God overthrew the city by a judgment from heaven; not by fire and brimstone, but by a water-spout, which, in the space of the five years that it lay upon the town three feet deep, loosened the foundations of all buildings and impoverished the inhabitants. And when at length the earth opened and swallowed up these waters, the city had to be rebuilt. The misery and distress that this flood inflicted upon the lower orders of the inhabitants was great in the extreme.
It was on Sunday morning that the cause of the moral superiority of the American