The circumstances under which the story came to be related to me may be told in very few words.

The interior of a convent parlor being a complete novelty to me, I looked around with some interest on first entering my painting-room at the nunnery.  There was but little in it to excite the curiosity of any one.  The floor was covered with common matting, and the ceiling with plain whitewash.  The furniture was of the simplest kind; a low chair with a praying-desk fixed to the back, and a finely carved oak book-case, studded all over with brass crosses, being the only useful objects that I could discern which had any conventional character about them.  As for the ornaments of the room, they were entirely beyond my appreciation.  I could feel no interest in the colored prints of saints, with gold platters at the backs of their heads, that hung on the wall; and I could see nothing particularly impressive in the two plain little alabaster pots for holy water, fastened, one near the door, the other over the chimney-piece.  The only object, indeed, in the whole room which in the slightest degree attracted my curiosity was an old worm-eaten wooden cross, made in the rudest manner, hanging by itself on a slip of wall between two windows.  It was so strangely rough and misshapen a thing to exhibit prominently in a neat roam, that I suspected some history must be attached to it, and resolved to speak to my friend the nun about it at the earliest opportunity.

“Mother Martha,” said I, taking advantage of the first pause in the succession of quaintly innocent questions which she was as usual addressing to me, “I have been looking at that rough old cross hanging between the windows, and fancying that it must surely be some curiosity—­”

“Hush! hush!” exclaimed the nun, “you must not speak of that as a ‘curiosity’; the Mother Superior calls it a Relic.”

“I beg your pardon,” said I; “I ought to have chosen my expressions more carefully—­”

“Not,” interposed Mother Martha, nodding to show me that my apology need not be finished—­“not that it is exactly a relic in the strict Catholic sense of the word; but there were circumstances in the life of the person who made it—­” Here she stopped, and looked at me doubtfully.

“Circumstances, perhaps, which it is not considered advisable to communicate to strangers,” I suggested.

“Oh, no!” answered the nun, “I never heard that they were to be kept a secret.  They were not told as a secret to me.”

“Then you know all about them?” I asked.

“Certainly.  I could tell you the whole history of the wooden cross; but it is all about Catholics, and you are a Protestant.”

“That, Mother Martha, does not make it at all less interesting to me.”

“Does it not, indeed?” exclaimed the nun, innocently.  “What a strange man you are! and what a remarkable religion yours must be!  What do your priests say about ours?  Are they learned men, your priests?”