"Show me your dwelling, and I shall see your character," say I.
And surely never was there a chamber so permeated by the nature of its tenant as that private dining-room of my mother's.
It was a narrow room in the shape of a small parallelogram, with the windows set high up near the timbered, whitewashed ceiling, so that it was impossible either to look in or to look out, as is sometimes the case with the windows of a chapel.
On the white space of wall that faced the door hung a great wooden Crucifix, very rudely carved by one who either knew nothing of anatomy, or else--as is more probable--was utterly unable to set down his knowledge upon timber.

The crudely tinted figure would be perhaps half the natural size of a man; and it was the most repulsive and hideous representation of the Tragedy of Golgotha that I have ever seen.

It filled one with a horror which was far indeed removed from the pious horror which that Symbol is intended to arouse in every true believer.
It emphasized all the ghastly ugliness of death upon that most barbarous of gallows, without any suggestion of the beauty and immensity of the Divine Martyrdom of Him Who in the likeness of the sinful flesh was Alone without sin.
And to me the ghastliest and most pitiful thing of all was an artifice which its maker had introduced for the purpose of conveying some suggestion of the supernatural to that mangled, malformed, less than human representation.

Into the place of the wound made by the spear of Longinus, he had introduced a strip of crystal which caught the light at certain angles--more particularly when there were lighted tapers in the room--so that in reflecting this it seemed to shed forth luminous rays.
An odd thing was that my mother--who looked upon that Crucifix with eyes that were very different from mine--would be at pains in the evening when lights were fetched to set a taper at such an angle as was best calculated to produce the effect upon which the sculptor had counted.
What satisfaction it can have been to her to see reflected from that glazed wound the light which she herself had provided for the purpose, I am lost to think.

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 holy-water, into the back of which was stuck a withered, yellow branch of palm, which was renewed on each Palm Sunday.