There is a series of little parlors, low and dim, with unpainted beams, and queer old chairs, and two black grates with nearly a yard between, through which you can converse, as through a tunnel, with the nuns. They have not been changed since St. Teresa’s time. In one of these our Lord reproved her for her conversations, which still savored too much of the world. Here, later in life, St. Francis Borgia came to see her on his way from the convent of Yuste, where he had been to visit his kinsman, Charles V. Here she saw St. Peter of Alcantara in ecstasy. In one of these parlors, now regarded as a sacred spot, she held her interviews with St. John of the Cross when he was director of the house. It is related that one day, while he was discoursing here on the mystery of the Holy Trinity, she was so impressed by his words that she fell on her knees to listen. In a short time he entered the ecstatic state, leaving St. Teresa lost in divine contemplation; and when one of the nuns came with a message, she found them both suspended in the air! For a moment they ceased to belong to earth, and its laws did not control them. A picture of this scene hangs on the wall. In a larger and more cheerful parlor some nuns of very pleasing manners of the true Spanish type showed us several objects that belonged to St. Teresa, and some of her embroidery of curious Spanish work, very nicely done, as we were glad to see; likewise, a Christ covered with bleeding wounds as he appeared to St. John of the Cross, and many other touching memorials of the past. We next visited the church, which is large, with buttressed walls, low, square towers, and a gabled belfry. The interior is spacious and lofty, but severe in style. There is a nave, and two short transepts with a dome rising between them. It is paved with flag-stones, and plain wooden benches stand against the stone walls. The high altar, at which St. John of the Cross used to say Mass, has its gilt retable, with colonnettes and niches filled with the saints of the order, among whom we remember the prophets who dwelt on Mt. Carmel, and St. Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem. The nuns’ choir is at the opposite end of the church. We should say _choirs_; for they have two, one above the other, with double black grates, which are generally curtained. It was at the grate of the lower choir, dim and mystic as his _Obscure Night of the Soul_, that St. John of the Cross used to preach to the nuns. What sermons there must have been from him who wrote, as never man wrote, on the upward way from night to light!