s usual
addressing to me, "I have been looking at that rough old cross
hanging between the windows, and fancying that it must surely be some
curiosity--"

"Hush! hush!" exclaimed the nun, "you must not speak of that as a
'curiosity'; the Mother Superior calls it a Relic."

"I beg your pardon," said I; "I ought to have chosen my expressions more
carefully--"

"Not," interposed Mother Martha, nodding to show me that my apology need
not be finished--"not that it is exactly a relic in the strict Catholic
sense of the word; but there were circumstances in the life of the
person who made it--" Here she stopped, and looked at me doubtfully.

"Circumstances, perhaps, which it is not considered advisable to
communicate to strangers," I suggested.

"Oh, no!" answered the nun, "I never heard that they were to be kept a
secret. They were not told as a secret to me."

"Then you know all about them?" I asked.

"Certainly. I could tell you the whole history of the wooden cross; but
it is all about Catholics, and you are a Protestant."

"That, Mother Martha, does not make it at all less interesting to me."

"Does it not, indeed?" exclaimed the nun, innocently. "What a strange
man you are! and what a remarkable religion yours must be! What do your
priests say about ours? Are they learned men, your priests?"

I felt that my chance of hearing Mother Martha's story would be a poor
one indeed, if I allowed her to begin a fresh string of questions.
Accordingly, I dismissed the inquiries about the clergy of the
Established Church with the most irreverent briefness, and recalled her
attention forthwith to the subject of the wooden cross.

"Yes, yes," said the good-natured nun; "surely you shall hear all I can
tell you about it; but--" she hesitated timidly, "but I must ask the
Mother Superior's leave first."

Saying these words, she summoned the portress, to my great amusement, to
keep guard over the inestimable Correggio in her absence, and left the
room. In less than five minutes she came back, looking quite happy and
important in her innocent way.

"The Mother Superior," she said, "has given me leave to tell all I know
about the wooden cross. She says it may do you good, and improve your
Protestant opinion of us Catholics."

I expressed myself as being both willing and anxious to profit by what I
heard; and the nun began her narrative immediately.

She related it in her own simple, earnest, minute way; dwelling as
long on