e centuries, has here and there been reared upon
gigantic buttresses, which jut upon the _balze_ at a sometimes giddy
height.

The Abbate received us with true courtesy, and gave us spacious
rooms, three cells apiece, facing Siena and the western mountains.
There is accommodation, he told us, for three hundred monks; but
only three are left in it. As this order was confined to members of
the nobility, each of the religious had his own apartment--not a
cubicle such as the uninstructed dream of when they read of monks,
but separate chambers for sleep and study and recreation.

In the middle of the vast sad landscape, the place is still, with a
silence that can be almost heard. The deserted state of those
innumerable cells, those echoing corridors and shadowy cloisters,
exercises overpowering tyranny over the imagination. Siena is so far
away, and Montalcino is so faintly outlined on its airy parapet,
that these cities only deepen our sense of desolation. It is a
relief to mark at no great distance on the hillside a contadino
guiding his oxen, and from a lonely farm yon column of ascending
smoke. At least the world goes on, and life is somewhere resonant
with song. But here there rests a pall of silence among the
oak-groves and the cypresses and _balze_. As I leaned and mused,
while Christian (my good friend and fellow-traveller from the
Grisons) made our beds, a melancholy sunset flamed up from a rampart
of cloud, built like a city of the air above the mountains of
Volterra--fire issuing from its battlements, and smiting the fretted
roof of heaven above. It was a conflagration of celestial rose upon
the saddest purples and cavernous recesses of intensest azure.

We had an excellent supper in the visitors' refectory--soup, good
bread and country wine, ham, a roast chicken with potatoes, a nice
white cheese made of sheep's milk, and grapes for dessert. The kind
Abbate sat by, and watched his four guests eat, tapping his
tortoiseshell snuff-box, and telling us many interesting things
about the past and present state of the convent. Our company was
completed with Lupo, the pet cat, and Pirro, a woolly Corsican dog,
very good friends, and both enormously voracious. Lupo in particular
engraved himself upon the memory of Christian, into whose large legs
he thrust his claws, when the cheese-parings and scraps were not
supplied him with sufficient promptitude. I never saw a hungrier and
bolder cat. It made one fancy that even