All things in it are of the past. Even its single pawnbroker takes
in no pledges, nor has he for a long time, but offers vainly an
unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier articles are dim
and pale old watches apparently in a slow perspiration, tarnished
sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books.
The most abundant and the most agreeable evidences of progressing
life in Cloisterham are the evidences of vegetable life in many
gardens; even its drooping and despondent little theatre has its
poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he ducks from
its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or oyster-
shells, according to the season of the year.
In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns' House: a venerable
brick edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from
the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its
old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the
legend: 'Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.' The house-
front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so shining and
staring, that the general result has reminded imaginative strangers
of a battered old beau with a large modern eye-glass stuck in his
blind eye.
Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a
stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads
to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many
chambers of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows
telling their beads for their mortification, instead of making
necklaces of them for their adornment; whether they were ever
walled up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building
for having some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them
which has kept the fermenting world alive ever since; these may be
matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute
no item in Miss Twinkleton's half-yearly accounts.
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