'Where are you going to get a letter from, Mother Praskovya,' I say, 'when you haven't had one for twelve years ?' Her daughter had been taken away to Turkey by her husband, and for twelve years there had been no sight nor sound of her.

Only I was sitting the next evening at tea with the Mother Superior (she was a princess by birth), there was some lady there too, a visitor, a great dreamer, and a little monk from Athos was sitting there too, a rather absurd man to my thinking.

What do you think, Shatushka, that monk from Athos had brought Mother Praskovya a letter from her daughter in Turkey, that morning--so much for the knave of diamonds--unexpected news! We were drinking our tea, and the monk from Athos said to the Mother Superior, 'Blessed Mother Superior, God has blessed your convent above all things in that you preserve so great a treasure in its precincts,' said he.

'What treasure is that ?' asked the Mother Superior.

'The Mother Lizaveta, the Blessed.' This Lizaveta the Blessed was enshrined in the nunnery wall, in a cage seven feet long and five feet high, and she had been sitting there for seventeen years in nothing but a hempen shift, summer and winter, and she always kept pecking at the hempen cloth with a straw or a twig of some sort, and she never said a word, and never combed her hair, or washed, for seventeen years.