exaggerated conscience to charge itself, even in a convent, with crimes enough to fill all the paper I required. I was filling them all the time with their crimes, not my own. Another great mistake I made, was being wholly unprepared for the great confession when it came on. I received intimations of this as we walked in the garden,—I have before mentioned that I had assumed an amicability of habit toward them. They would say to me, “You have made ample preparations for the great confession.” “I have prepared myself.” “But we expect great edification from its results.” “I trust you will receive it.”—I said no more, but I was very much disturbed at these hints. Others would say, “My brother, amid the multitudinous offences that burden your conscience, and which you have found necessary to employ quires of paper to record, would it not be a relief to you to open your mind to the Superior, and ask for a few previous moments of consolation and direction from him.” To this I answered, “I thank you, and will consider of it.”—I was thinking all the time of something else.

“It was a few nights before the time of the great confession, that I had to entrust the last packet of my memorial to the porter. Our meetings had been hitherto unsuspected. I had received and answered my brother’s communications, and our correspondence had been conducted with a secrecy unexampled in convents. But this last night, as I put my packet into the porter’s hand, I saw a change in his appearance that terrified me. He had been a comely, robust man, but now, even by the moon-light, I could perceive he was wasted to a shadow,—his hands trembled as he took the papers from me,—his voice faultered as he promised his usual secrecy. The change, which had been observed by the whole convent, had escaped me till that night; my mind had been too much occupied by my own situation. I noticed it then, however, and I said, “But what is the matter?” “Can you then ask? I am withered to a spectre by the terrors of the office I have been bribed to. Do you know what I risk?—incarceration for life, or rather for death,—perhaps a denunciation to the Inquisition. Every line I deliver from you, or to you, seems a charge against my own soul,—I tremble when I meet you. I know that you have the sources of life and death, temporal and eternal, in your hands. The secret in which I am an agent should never be intrusted but to one, and you are another. As I sit in my place, I think every step in the cloister is advancing to summon me to the presence of the Superior. When I attend in the choir, amid the sounds of devotion your voice swells to accuse me. When I lie down at night, the evil spirit is beside my bed, reproaching me with perjury, and reclaiming 

 Prev. P 3/113 next