On this hot summer's morn of which I am relating, I managed to escape for a moment from my over-amiable assailants, so as to steal into a tiny hut of which the door stood wide open.
"A CONVENT ... WHITE AND LONELY, HIDDEN AWAY IN WOODED REGIONS GREENER AND SWEETER THAN ANY OTHER IN THE LAND" (p. [25]).
Irresistibly attracted by its mysterious shade, I penetrated into the mud-made hovel, finding myself in almost complete darkness. At the farther end a wee window let in a small ray of light.
Groping my way, I came upon a pallet of rags, and upon that couch of misery I discovered an old, old woman—so old, so old, that she might have existed in the time of fairies and witches, times no more in touch with the bustle and noise of to-day.
Bending over her, I gazed into her shrunken face, and all the legends of my youth seemed to rise up before me, all the stories that as a child, entranced, I had listened to, stories one never forgets....
Above her, hanging from a rusty nail within reach of her hand, was a curiously shaped black earthenware pot. Everything around this old hag was the colour of the earth: her face, her dwelling, the rags that covered her, the floor on which I stood. The only touch of light in this hovel was a white lamb, crouching quite undisturbed at the foot of her bed.
Pressing some money between her crooked bony fingers, I left this strange old mortal to her snowy companion, and, stepping back into the sunshine, I had the sensation that for an instant it had been given me to stray through unnumbered ages into the days of yore.