Before it was set a praying-stool of plain oak, without any cushion to mitigate its harshness to the knees.
In the corner of the room stood a tall, spare, square cupboard, capacious but very plain, in which the necessaries of the table were disposed.

In the opposite corner there was another smaller cupboard with a sort of writing-pulpit beneath.

Here my mother kept the accounts of her household, her books of recipes, her homely medicines and the heavy devotional tomes and lesser volumes--mostly manuscript--out of which she nourished her poor starving soul.
Amongst these was the Treatise of the Mental Sufferings of Christ--the book of the Blessed Battista of Varano, Princess of Camerino, who founded the convent of Poor Clares in that city--a book whose almost blasphemous presumption fired the train of my earliest misgivings.
Another was The Spiritual Combat, that queer yet able book of the cleric Scupoli--described as the "aureo libro," dedicated "Al Supremo Capitano e Gloriosissimo Trionfatore, Gesu Cristo, Figliuolo di Maria," and this dedication in the form of a letter to Our Saviour, signed, "Your most humble servant, purchased with Your Blood." 1 1 This work, which achieved a great vogue and of which several editions were issued down to 1750, was first printed in 1589.

Clearly, however, MS.

copies were in existence earlier, and it is to one of these that Agostino here refers.
Down the middle of the chamber ran a long square-ended table of oak, very plain like all the rest of the room's scant furnishings.