of the natural
size, and of the livid color of death; gaping red wounds on the body and
round the brows: the whole piece enough to turn one sick, and fit only
to brutalize the beholder of it. The Virgin is commonly represented with
a dozen swords stuck in her heart; bleeding throats of headless John
Baptists are perpetually thrust before your eyes. At the Cathedral
gate was a papier-mache church-ornament shop--most of the carvings and
reliefs of the same dismal character: one, for instance, represented
a heart with a great gash in it, and a double row of large blood-drops
dribbling from it; nails and a knife were thrust into the heart; round
the whole was a crown of thorns. Such things are dreadful to think of.
The same gloomy spirit which made a religion of them, and worked upon
the people by the grossest of all means, terror, distracted the natural
feelings of man to maintain its power--shut gentle women into
lonely, pitiless convents--frightened poor peasants with tales
of torment--taught that the end and labor of life was silence,
wretchedness, and the scourge--murdered those by fagot and prison
who thought otherwise. How has the blind and furious bigotry of man
perverted that which God gave us as our greatest boon, and bid us hate
where God bade us love! Thank heaven that monk has gone out of sight! It
is pleasant to look at the smiling, cheerful old Beguine, and think no
more of yonder livid face.

One of the many convents in this little religious city seems to be the
specimen-house, which is shown to strangers, for all the guides conduct
you thither, and I saw in a book kept for the purpose the names of
innumerable Smiths and Joneses registered.

A very kind, sweet-voiced, smiling nun (I wonder, do they always choose
the most agreeable and best-humored sister of the house to show it to
strangers?) came tripping down the steps and across the flags of the
little garden-court, and welcomed us with much courtesy into the neat
little old-fashioned, red-bricked, gable-ended, shining-windowed Convent
of the Angels. First she showed us a whitewashed parlor, decorated with
a grim picture or two and some crucifixes and other religious emblems,
where, upon stiff old chairs, the sisters sit and work. Three or four of
them were still there, pattering over their laces and bobbins; but the
chief part of the sisterhood were engaged in an apartment hard by, from
which issued a certain odor which I must say resembled onions: it w