"Tell me whom you go with, and I will tell you what you are," says the
proverb. "Show me your dwelling, and I shall see your character," say I.

And surely never was there a chamber so permeated by the nature of its
tenant as that private dining-room of my mother's.

It was a narrow room in the shape of a small parallelogram, with the
windows set high up near the timbered, whitewashed ceiling, so that it was
impossible either to look in or to look out, as is sometimes the case with
the windows of a chapel.

On the white space of wall that faced the door hung a great wooden
Crucifix, very rudely carved by one who either knew nothing of anatomy, or
else--as 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.