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. In the winter they used to put a sheepskin in for her, and every day a piece of bread and a jug of water. The pilgrims gaze at her, sigh and exclaim, and make offerings of money. ‘A treasure you’ve pitched on,’ answered the Mother Superior⁠—(she was angry, she disliked Lizaveta dreadfully)⁠—‘Lizaveta only sits there out of spite, out of pure obstinacy, it is nothing but hypocrisy.’ I didn’t like this; I was thinking at the time of shutting myself up too.