has been one of continual suffering; and for what?  For just nothing at all, or for the most simple things.  Is it right, is it just to starve a person two whole days for shutting the door a little too hard? or to burn one with hot irons because a little water was accidentally spilt on the floor?  Yet for these and similar things I have again and again been tortured within an inch of my life.  Now that I am to be hung, I am glad of it, for I shall die quick, and be out of my misery, instead of being tortured to death by inches.  I did this thing for this very purpose, for I do not fear death nor anything that comes after it.  Talk about the existence of a God!  I don’t believe a word of it.  And the story of heaven and hell, purgatory, and the Virgin Mary; why, it’s all a humbug, like the rest of the vile stuff you call religion.  Religion indeed!  You wont catch us nuns believing it, and more than all that, you don’t believe it yourselves, not one of you.”

She sat down, and they put a cap over her head and face, drew it tight around her neck, adjusted the rope, and she was launched into eternity.  To me it seemed a horrid thing, and I could not look upon her dying struggles.  I did not justify the girl in what she had done, yet I knew that the woman would have died if she had let her alone; and I also knew that worse things than that were done in the nunnery almost every day, and that too by the very men who had taken her life.  I left the chapel with a firm resolve to make one more effort to escape from a thraldom that everyday became more irksome.

At the door the Abbess met me, and led me to a room I had never seen before, where, to my great surprise, I found my bed.  She said it was removed by her order, and in future I was to sleep in that room.  “What! sleep here alone?” I exclaimed, quite forgetting, in the agitation of the moment, the rule of silent obedience.  But she did not condescend to notice either my question or the unpleasant feelings which must have been visible in my features.  I did feel very much troubled.  I had never slept in a room alone a night in my life.  Another nun always occupied the room with me, and when she was absent, as she often was when under punishment, the Abbess slept there, so that I was never alone.  I did not often meet the girl with whom I slept, as she did not work in the kitchen, but whenever I did, I felt as pleased as though she had been my sister.  Yet I never spoke to her, nor did she ever attempt to converse with me.  Yes, strange as it may seem, incredible as my reader may think it, it is a fact, that during all the years we slept together, not one word ever passed between us.  We did not even dare to communicate our thoughts by signs, lest the Abbess should detect us.