The Burning of the Convent (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SUNDAY PRIVILEGES. cing, even with the help of the dictionary. The pupils were allowed only to spend one Sunday in a month out of the Convent, either with their parents or guardians, and my prophetic imagination warned me that each month would seem a compressed eternity. Sunday duties were defined in deference to Protestant prejudices; the pupils were expected to attend Morning Mass, but Protestants might read their own Bibles during the ceremony. Owing, perhaps, to the Puritan strictness of home, ?for, notwithstanding my father's Unitarian belief, he thought it conducive to discipline to keep the Sabbath as it was kept in his youth, ? T did not value that privilege, as my mother assured me I ought to do, nor yet the prospect of committing chapters to memory on Sunday afternoons, which indulgence the circular also promised to Protestant children. In my heart I suspected that the Catholic pupils had the easiest Sundays to bear. It was a relief to turn from those gloomy paragraphs in the circular to those which treated of dress; this matter was discussed with a seriousness befitting the greater importance of the subject. The pupils were expected to dress in uniform: blue merino frocks, darker blue wadded pelisses, beaver bonnets trimmed with blue, was the wear for winter; and pink calico, as the best washable color, for summer, with white frocks for "best," black silk capes and aprons, and straw bonnets trimmed with pink. No wonder I remember the details, for my mother read them over and over in every tone of voice, from defiance to despair and from. despair to submission, in view of the trouble and expense involved in preparing such an outfit for me. Mrs. Richards the dressmaker, who worked for the family one month in spring, another in fall, made her appearance, with topless...