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
Scupoli--described as the "aureo libro," dedicated "Al Supremo Capitano e
Gloriosissimo Trionfatore, Gesu Cristo, Figliuolo di Maria," and this
dedication in the form of a letter to Our Saviour, signed, "Your most
humble servant, purchased with Your Blood.
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