is more probable--was utterly unable to set down his
knowledge upon timber. The crudely tinted figure would be perhaps half
the natural size of a man; and it was the most repulsive and hideous
representation of the Tragedy of Golgotha that I have ever seen. It
filled one with a horror which was far indeed removed from the pious
horror which that Symbol is intended to arouse in every true believer.
It emphasized all the ghastly ugliness of death upon that most barbarous
of gallows, without any suggestion of the beauty and immensity of the
Divine Martyrdom of Him Who in the likeness of the sinful flesh was
Alone without sin.

And to me the ghastliest and most pitiful thing of all was an artifice
which its maker had introduced for the purpose of conveying some
suggestion of the supernatural to that mangled, malformed, less than
human representation. Into the place of the wound made by the spear of
Longinus, he had introduced a strip of crystal which caught the light at
certain angles--more particularly when there were lighted tapers in the
room--so that in reflecting this it seemed to shed forth luminous rays.

An odd thing was that my mother--who looked upon that Crucifix with eyes
that were very different from mine--would be at pains in the evening
when lights were fetched to set a taper at such an angle as was best
calculated to produce the effect upon which the sculptor had counted.
What satisfaction it can have been to her to see reflected from that
glazed wound the light which she herself had provided for the purpose,
I am lost to think. And yet I am assured that she would contemplate that
shining effluence in a sort of ecstatic awe, accounting it something
very near akin to miracle.

Under this Crucifix hung a little alabaster font of holy-water, into
the back of which was stuck a withered, yellow branch of palm, which was
renewed on each Palm Sunday. Before it was set a praying-stool of plain
oak, without any cushion to mitigate its harshness to the knees.

In the corner of the room stood a tall, spare, square cupboard,
capacious but very plain, in which the necessaries of the table were
disposed. In the opposite corner there was another smaller cupboard with
a sort of writing-pulpit beneath. Here my mother kept the accounts of
her household, her books of recipes, her homely medicines and the heavy
devotional tomes and lesser volumes--mostly manuscript--out of which she
nourished her poor starving soul.

Amon