One of us was occasionally called into her room, to cut her nails or
dress her hair; and we would often collect the clippings, and
distribute them to each other, or preserve them with the utmost care. I
once picked up all the stray hairs I could find, after combing her
head, bound them 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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