together, and kept them for some time, until she told me I was not
worthy to possess things so sacred. Jane McCoy and I were once sent to
alter a dress for the Superior. I gathered up all the bits of thread,
made a little bag, and put them into it for safe preservation. This I
wore a long time around my neck, so long, indeed, that I wore out a
number of strings, which, I remember, I replace with new ones. I
believed it to possess the power of removing pain, and often prayed to
it to cure the tooth-ache, &c. Jane Ray sometimes professed to outgo us
all in devotion to the Superior, and would pick up the feathers after
making her bed. These she would distributed among us, saying, "When the
Superior dies, reliques will begin to grow scarce, and you had better
supply yourselves in season." Then she would treat the whole matter in
some way to turn it into ridicule. Equally contradictory would she
appear, when occasionally she would obtain leave from the Superior to
tell her dreams. With a serious face, which sometimes imposed upon all
of us, and made us half believe she was in a perfect state of sanctity,
she would narrate in French some unaccountable vision which she said she
had enjoyed. Then turning round, would say, "There are some who do not
understand me; you all ought to be informed." And then she would say
something totally different in English, which put us to the greatest
agony for fear of laughing. Sometimes she would say that she expected to
be Superior herself, one of these days, and other things which I have
not room to repeat.

While I was in the Congregational Nunnery, I had gone to the parish
church whenever I was to confess; for although the nuns had a private
confession-room in the building, the boarders were taken in parties
through the streets on different days by some of the nuns, to confess in
the church; but in the Black Nunnery, as we had a chapel and priests
attending in the confessionals, we never left the building.