CHAPTER XII.
THE CASKET.
Behind the house at the Rue Fossette there was a garden--large, considering that it lay in the heart of a city, and to my recollection at this day it seems pleasant: but time, like distance, lends to certain scenes an influence so softening; and where all is stone around, blank wall and hot pavement, how precious seems one shrub, how lovely an enclosed and planted spot of ground! There went a tradition that Madame Beck's house had in old days been a convent.

That in years gone by--how long gone by I cannot tell, but I think some centuries--before the city had over-spread this quarter, and when it was tilled ground and avenue, and such deep and leafy seclusion as ought to embosom a religious house-that something had happened on this site which, rousing fear and inflicting horror, had left to the place the inheritance of a ghost-story.

A vague tale went of a black and white nun, sometimes, on some night or nights of the year, seen in some part of this vicinage.

The ghost must have been built out some ages ago, for there were houses all round now; but certain convent-relics, in the shape of old and huge fruit-trees, yet consecrated the spot; and, at the foot of one--a Methuselah of a pear-tree, dead, all but a few boughs which still faithfully renewed their perfumed snow in spring, and their honey-sweet pendants in autumn--you saw, in scraping away the mossy earth between the half-bared roots, a glimpse of slab, smooth, hard, and black.

The legend went, unconfirmed and unaccredited, but still propagated, that this was the portal of a vault, imprisoning deep beneath that ground, on whose surface grass grew and flowers bloomed, the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here buried alive for some sin against her vow.