as in
fact the kitchen of the establishment.

Every Beguine cooks her own little dinner in her own little pipkin; and
there was half a score of them, sure enough, busy over their pots and
crockery, cooking a repast which, when ready, was carried off to a
neighboring room, the refectory, where, at a ledge-table which is drawn
out from under her own particular cupboard, each nun sits down and
eats her meal in silence. More religious emblems ornamented the carved
cupboard-doors, and within, everything was as neat as neat could be:
shining pewter-ewers and glasses, snug baskets of eggs and pats of
butter, and little bowls with about a farthing's-worth of green tea in
them--for some great day of fete, doubtless. The old ladies sat round
as we examined these things, each eating soberly at her ledge and never
looking round. There was a bell ringing in the chapel hard by. "Hark!"
said our guide, "that is one of the sisters dying. Will you come up and
see the cells?"

The cells, it need not be said, are the snuggest little nests in the
world, with serge-curtained beds and snowy linen, and saints and martyrs
pinned against the wall. "We may sit up till twelve o'clock, if we
like," said the nun; "but we have no fire and candle, and so what's the
use of sitting up? When we have said our prayers we are glad enough to
go to sleep."

I forget, although the good soul told us, how many times in the day,
in public and in private, these devotions are made, but fancy that the
morning service in the chapel takes place at too early an hour for most
easy travellers. We did not fail to attend in the evening, when likewise
is a general muster of the seven hundred, minus the absent and sick, and
the sight is not a little curious and striking to a stranger.

The chapel is a very big whitewashed place of worship, supported by half
a dozen columns on either side, over each of which stands the statue
of an Apostle, with his emblem of martyrdom. Nobody was as yet at the
distant altar, which was too far off to see very distinctly; but I could
perceive two statues over it, one of which (St. Laurence, no doubt) was
leaning upon a huge gilt gridiron that the sun lighted up in a blaze--a
painful but not a romantic instrument of death. A couple of old ladies
in white hoods were tugging and swaying about at two bell-ropes that
came down into the middle of the church, and at least five hundred
others in white veils were seated all round about us in mute