Let us turn from such an unpoetical scene as this, which that cheerful prison presents, to the convent of Santa Teresa, the most celebrated of all the ten or fifteen nunneries now in operation about the city of Mexico. In a cold, damp, comfortless cell, kneeling upon the pavement, we may see a delicate woman mechanically repeating her daily-imposed penance of Latin prayers, before the image of a favorite saint and a basin of holy water. This self-regulating, automaton praying machine, as she counts off the number of allotted prayers by the number of beads upon her rosary, beats into her bosom the sharp edge of an iron cross that rests within her shirt of sacking-cloth, until, nature and her task exhausted, she throws herself down upon a wooden bed, so ingeniously arranged as to make sleep intolerable. This poor victim of self-inflicted daily torture, half crazed from insufficient food, and sleep, and clothing, has endured all this misery to accumulate a stock of good works for the use of less meritorious sinners, besides the amount necessary to carry herself to heaven; for penance, and not repentance, is this poor pagan's password for salvation.
The old Quakeress is not a fashionable saint, for she never dreamed of this huxter business in spiritual affairs. Out of the overflowing goodness of her heart, she had tried to lighten the miseries of life in her own humble and quiet way, and found her happiness in seeing all about her made comfortable. The money that others expended in buying masses for the repose of their own souls and those of their relatives after death, she expended in ministering to soul and body in this world, leaving to God above the affairs of departed spirits, to deal with them according to His mercy.