n could ask a man, that Mother
Martha did not, in the smallest and softest of voices, ask of me. Though
an intelligent, well-informed person in all that related to her
own special vocation, she was a perfect child in everything else. I
constantly caught myself talking to her, just as I should have talked at
home to one of my own little girls.

I hope no one will think that, in expressing myself thus, I am writing
disparagingly of the poor nun. On two accounts, I shall always feel
compassionately and gratefully toward Mother Martha. She was the only
person in the convent who seemed sincerely anxious to make her presence
in the parlor as agreeable to me as possible; and she good-humoredly
told me the story which it is my object in these pages to introduce to
the reader. In both ways I am deeply indebted to her; and I hope always
to remember the obligation.

The circumstances under which the story came to be related to me may be
told in very few words.

The interior of a convent parlor being a complete novelty to me, I
looked around with some interest on first entering my painting-room at
the nunnery. There was but little in it to excite the curiosity of any
one. The floor was covered with common matting, and the ceiling with
plain whitewash. The furniture was of the simplest kind; a low
chair with a praying-desk fixed to the back, and a finely carved oak
book-case, studded all over with brass crosses, being the only useful
objects that I could discern which had any conventional character about
them. As for the ornaments of the room, they were entirely beyond my
appreciation. I could feel no interest in the colored prints of saints,
with gold platters at the backs of their heads, that hung on the wall;
and I could see nothing particularly impressive in the two plain little
alabaster pots for holy water, fastened, one near the door, the other
over the chimney-piece. The only object, indeed, in the whole room which
in the slightest degree attracted my curiosity was an old worm-eaten
wooden cross, made in the rudest manner, hanging by itself on a slip
of wall between two windows. It was so strangely rough and misshapen
a thing to exhibit prominently in a neat roam, that I suspected some
history must be attached to it, and resolved to speak to my friend the
nun about it at the earliest opportunity.

"Mother Martha," said I, taking advantage of the first pause in the
succession of quaintly innocent questions which she was a