The following history, related by Villafane, of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, resembles in some repects that of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios. In the year 1541 the aged Bishop of Panama, Don Tomas de Berlanga, was on his voyage home to Spain from America, with the view of resigning his bishoprick, and of retiring to a convent for the rest of his days, when a tremendous storm arose, spreading the utmost consternation among the crew and passengers in the ship, and the bishop, throwing his episcopal vestments around him, fell upon his knees on the deck and began to recite the litany of the Virgin Mary with the utmost fervour; but still the tempest raged, increasing in violence every instant, until at length a breaker of far greater size than all the others, and which was so high as to appear like a huge column of water, reared itself aloft, and seemed to render the vessel's destruction inevitable. The ship's crew stood aghast; but the aged bishop was undaunted, and continued reciting the litany with increased fervour, and the immense bulk of water struck the vessel quite gently, and from the midst of it was cast out upon the deck a small wooden box, and then the tempest instantly ceased. Upon this a dispute arose between the bishop and the captain of the vessel as to which of them the box belonged; but it was at length proposed by the bishop that if (as he suspected) it contained any holy relic, or anything whatever appertaining to the worship of God, it should belong to him; but that if it contained gold or treasure, or anything else of mere worldly value, the captain should retain possession of it; which proposal met with the latter's approval.

On opening the box, a brilliant light issued from it, and inside was found a beautiful image of the Virgin, which, upon arriving in Spain, the bishop had placed, with great pomp, in the convent of the city of Medina de Mioseco, into which he retired, according to the determination he had made.

We now come to the class of female names before mentioned, which are merely derived from the history connected with some particular effigy of the Virgin, without expressing any attribute.

All that Juan de Villafane can tell us of the image of "Nuestra Señora de Fuente Santa" (generally contracted into "Fuensanta") is, that it is contained in a small chapel outside the walls of the city of Cordova, and that tradition relates that it was found originally near a fountain, to which the name of Holy was given in consequence. The same miracle, that of loosening the tongue of a priest, is attributed to it as to that of "Nuestra Señora de las Virtudes." An image of the same virgin in a church near the city of Murcia is also an object of great veneration, and the name of Fuensanta is very common throughout the province.

The image of "Nuestra Señora de Guadaloupe," so intimately connected with that of "Nuestra Señora de los Angeles," as has been shown, is contained in the Convent of Guadaloupe, near Logrosan, and in the midst of the chain of mountains dividing the provinces of Toledo and Estremadura, of which latter province this Virgin is considered to be the especial patroness. The convent was formerly one of the richest in Spain. The image is said to have been carried through the streets of Rome by St. Gregory, and to have arrested the progress of a dreadful pestilence which was raging in that city. St. Gregory presented it afterwards to St. Isidore, who had come from Spain to a conclave upon religious matters, and who was preserved from shipwreck through its intervention on his voyage

home about the year 600. He carried it to Seville, where it was held in great veneration until the entrance of the Moors into Spain, when the citizens of Seville carried away the holy image lest it should fall into the hands of the infidels, and, wandering into Estremadura, buried it at length amidst the rocks of the "Sierra," at the foot of the Villuenca Mountain, and at the source of the river called Guadaloupe, a name derived, it is said, from the Arabic word "Guada," a stream, and "lobo," the Spanish for a wolf, these animals being numerous in this part of the country; and they also buried with it a history in writing of the sainted image.

Juan de Villafane thus relates the mode of its discovery: About the year 1326 a herdsman of Caceres, whilst minding his cows in the neighbourhood of the town of Talaverano, suddenly missed one of them, and wandered forth, during three days, amidst the mountains in search of it. At length, coming to a spring, he sat down beside it to drink, and refresh himself. After gazing about him for some time, he suddenly perceived the cow he was in search of, lying dead upon the ground a few paces off, but without any wound or external injury whatever. Wishing to carry away the animal's skin, the herdsman took out his knife, and by chance the first incision he made in the breast was in the form of a cross, and instantly the cow came to life and sprang upon its legs; the man stood aghast with astonishment, and, on looking round, he beheld the Blessed Virgin standing in great glory beside him, and she commanded him to drive the cow to Caceres, and to tell the priests of the convent there to come and search for the image of her which was buried where the cow lay dead, and where they were afterwards to erect a chapel in her honour.

Upon the herdsman's return to Caceres with his cow, he found his wife weeping upon the threshold of his cottage, for their only son was dead, and, casting himself upon his knees on the ground, he prayed fervently to the Virgin that, as she had vouchsafed to restore the animal to life, she would likewise resuscitate the human creature, and at the same moment the priests came to fetch the corpse away and bury it, when the young man immediately arose and besought his father to conduct him to the place he had just returned from, and where the Virgin had appeared to him. And then the herdsman related all that had befallen him, and showed the priests the cross in the cow's breast, which, together with the miraculous restoration of his son to life, induced them to give credence to him, and he conducted them to the spot where the miraculous apparition had revealed itself; and they dug up the holy image, which was in as good preservation as if it had been buried only the day before instead of some six hundred years; and they also found the written paper deposited with it. And Don Alonzo VII., King of Castile and Leon, replaced the small chapel which the priests erected on the spot by a convent, and endowed it with rich possessions.

The image of "Nuestra Señora de Montserrate" is now contained in the Church of Esparraguera, a small town in Catalonia, and was brought there in 1835 from a famous convent upon the Montserrate Mountain in the same neighbourhood, where it had been an object of great veneration for nearly a thousand years. Its discovery is thus related by Juan de Villefane. About the year 880, upon a Saturday, some shepherds were tending their flocks upon the banks of the River Lobregat, which flows at the foot of the Montserrate Mountain; and sometime after nightfall

they perceived that the mountain, far from being enveloped in the general darkness that prevailed, shone forth in daylight as clear as that of noonday, and at the same time they heard sweet music, apparently descending from heaven.

Upon the recurrence of this prodigy upon two succeeding Saturdays, the men went and told the priest of the neighbouring village of Aulesa, who, after he had himself witnessed the strange sight, related all that he had seen to Gottomaro, Bishop of Mauresa, who went with a procession to the mountain upon the Saturday following, when the usual wonderful phenomenon presented itself to his eyes. He ascended the mountain, accompanied by a large concourse of people, and in a cave near the summit they found a small image of the Virgin, which had been concealed there by some citizens of Barcelona upon the investiture of that city by the Moors in the year 717; and the convent which was founded upon the spot became one of the richest in Spain, being endowed by several succeeding sovereigns.

The image of "Nuestra Señora de los Reyes de Sevilla" is contained in the cathedral of the Andalusian capital, and derived its denomination of "Kings" from having been brought thither by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella the Catholic, or possibly might have acquired the appellation at a much earlier period, as, in consequence of the fleur-de-lis upon the right foot of the figure, it has been conjectured to have come originally from France, and to have been given by St. Louis of France to his cousin St. Ferdinand, King of Castile and Leon.

However, the tradition of its origin related by Villafane, and commonly believed at Seville, is as follows:

The Virgin having appeared to St. Ferdinand in a vision, his supreme desire was to possess an image of her exactly similar to the one indelibly impressed upon his imagination. He called around him the most skilful artificers his kingdom contained; but, notwithstanding the exact description he gave them of the divine apparition, they never succeeded in embodying it to the monarch's satisfaction. At length he began to despair of attaining the object of his wishes, when, on a certain day, two young men, apparently artisans, presented themselves, and engaged to make an image, exactly in accordance with the king's description of the vision, in the space of three days, if he would give them an apartment in which they might remain undisturbed. The king joyfully consented, and at the end of the specified time an image was found in the room exactly similar to the one which until then had existed in the king's imagination alone; but the workmen had disappeared, and were never heard of afterwards.

The image of "Nuestra Señora del Pilar," in the cathedral of Zaragoza, is held in the greatest veneration, not only in the province of Arragon, but throughout all Spain, and Villafane is more than usually voluminous in his notice of it, of which the following is an epitome:

The Apostle St. James, having arrived at Zaragoza during his mission to Spain, was kneeling in prayer outside the city, when, on a sudden, celestial music resounded from on high, and angels appeared amidst a great glare of light; and in the midst, the Mother of God, herself in glory, seated upon a throne, and with a small pillar of jasper, supporting a figure of herself of the same material in her hand, and she commanded the apostle to found a temple in honour of her on that spot, and delivered the figure to him to be erected in the middle of it. And the apostle and

his followers worked diligently, and, previously to quitting the place, completed a small, rude sanctuary around the pillar, which building was gradually, by the labours of the pious in after ages, increased in size and splendour, until it became the present magnificent structure.

Any descriptions of the different images of Virgins, or of the various votive offerings to them, have been purposely avoided, as well as any mention of the long list of miracles ascribed to almost all of them; for the first would be supererogatory in regard to a country like Spain, about which so much has been already written, and where every church or statue of any note has been so often described; and the second, apart the ignorant credulity they exhibit, and which is by no means interesting to detail, are far too numerous to come within the limits of this article, the only object of which is to furnish a definition of some of those female names, at once eccentric and poetical, which constitute a leading characteristic in a country possessing so many.

Names, such as Jesusa, or Trinidad, the latter perhaps the commonest appellation of all in every part of the country, do not come within the category intended to be here established, as they relate to the Redeemer alone, and do not imply any direct reference to the Virgin, and those, both male and female, derived from the saints, constitute, one may say, the baptismal appellations of the whole population of the Peninsula.

MAJOR OTIS CONKLIN'S LETTER FROM LONDON TO DR. ADONIRAM MERKLE OF CINCINNATI, OHIO.

EDITED BY UNCLE SAM.

MY DEAR ADONIRAM,

I have had a month's run over England, and parts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, since I arrived in these parts, which our grandfather was wont to call "the Old Country." Old it certainly is, for we can, any day, view the remains of works which occupied the legions of Julius Cæsar, or were performed at the beck of the chivalric followers of the Norman William. This fact you so much anticipate that you may be surprised when I state that everything not in ruins is much more new than old. That which looks the most antique is only "after the antique." Travel which way I will, nearly all I see is of modern date. I do believe that the British we thought were dying are all dead and buried, and that a fresh assortment is now on view, distributed for the most part in new, lofty and substantial buildings.

Liverpool is decidedly more modern than New York, for it has not a single wooden church or steeple: the docks just built seem destined to exhibit perfect granite at Doomsday, and the medieval British shipping is giving way to splendid specimens of rivalry to the purest American naval architecture. Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast and Birmingham are all new towns, or (not to speak equivocally) they are modern antiques. Old King Lud's town is buried so deep that it took

three editors of a newspaper to discover, under their modern printing office, any foundation of that king's reign. London should be named New London, in imitation of our York being called New York, for one is about as new as the other, except in name. Most of the churches, public buildings, streets and bridges in this modern Babylon are new. The Exchange is new, the Queen's Palace new, the Palace of the Legislature new, and even a considerable part of Westminster Abbey, venerable in name and association, is (including its monuments) but half a century old. The Tower of London, where the kings used to play such pranks as made the angels weep, is partly fresh from the chisel and brick-field. In the words of Macbeth "Nothing is" (ancient here) “but what is not!"

With every American you have heard of Covent Garden Market and Old Drury Lane. I arrived at a new hotel called the Old Hummums and found the market and the theatres with no marks of age on them. I lodge in a new street in their neighbourhood, and within a very short distance of nearly all the newspaper offices. Being too ill to read, during several days, for once in my life I amused myself by looking out of a window, and am therefore enabled to give you some statistics respecting it which will present a pen and ink sketch of the pantomime in ten thousand streets of this huge mass of human tenements.

In three days the puppet show called "Punch" came up the street five times without performing, but the sixth time the renowned buffoon, who has never yet been seen in America, went through his adventures and was carried off by Old Hookey, to the admiration of a considerable crowd of people of all ages. Two companies of tumblers spread their carpets and pointed the poles of their heads to the centre of terrestrial gravitation, and three quartettes of Ethiopian serenaders (among whom I am ashamed to confess I detected several white citizens of our glorious Republic) jumped Jim Crow; saluted Miss Dinah; inquired who was knocking at the door, and went "Ober de Mountain." Then there was a man who brought some canaries and bullfinches which danced on ropes and fired small pistols: another who came with a malicious but clever monkey riding on a melancholy dog: seventeen men with excruciating barrel organs: four Swiss mountaineers grinding stretched wires and chanting the airs of theatrical villagers: eight Romans dressed in brigand hats, and uttering bravuras, while they squeezed guitar strings and looked up towards the drawing-rooms: one man making a stupendous lingual noise to give audible notice that he was deaf and dumb, and required a proper consideration in copper-a brazen imposition I believe: two men dressed as very clean sailors, and supposed to be singing comic songs after being wrecked in the Bay of Biscay. Besides these there was a clerk-like looking man, with a buxom wife and seven well-behaved children, performing what is called "the silent dodge," which consists of two babies being nursed to sleep by their supposed mother, while the remainder of the juvenile group stand hand to hand in a row; the father looking on the pavement to express his amazement, shame and contrition at having so many children, and keeping one hand under his waistcoat while the other is continually offering a few matches in exchange for any number of small coppers in money.

The most miserable objects seen from my window were four in num