Accordingly, I dismissed the inquiries about the
clergy of the Established Church with the most irreverent
briefness, and recalled her attention forthwith to the subject of
the wooden cross.
"Yes, yes," said the good-natured nun; "surely you shall hear all
I can tell you about it; but--" she hesitated timidly, "but I
must ask the Mother Superior's leave first."
Saying these words, she summoned the portress, to my great
amusement, to keep guard over the inestimable Correggio in her
absence, and left the room. In less than five minutes she came
back, looking quite happy and important in her innocent way.
"The Mother Superior," she said, "has given me leave to tell all
I know about the wooden cross. She says it may do you good, and
improve your Protestant opinion of us Catholics."
I expressed myself as being both willing and anxious to profit by
what I heard; and the nun began her narrative immediately.
She related it in her own simple, earnest, minute way; dwelling
as long on small particulars as on important incidents; and
making moral reflections for my benefit at every place where it
was possible to introduce them. In spite, however, of these
drawbacks in the telling of it, the story interested and
impressed me in no ordinary degree; and I now purpose putting the
events of it together as skillfully and strikingly as I can, in
the hope that this written version of the narrative may appeal as
strongly to the reader's sympathies as the spoken version did to
mine.
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