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 holy­water, 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
writing­pulpit 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.

Amongst these was the Treatise of the Mental Sufferings of Christ--the book
of the Blessed Battista of Varano, Princess of Camerino, who founded the
convent of Poor Clares in that city--a book whose almost blasphemous
presumption fired the train of my earliest misgivings.

Another was The Spiritual Combat, that queer yet able book of the cleric