e little tubs of boats. Sometimes, at night, I hear the
fishermen coming home, singing in their lusty fashion; and I think it is
a good haven to arrive at. I never go down to search for stones on the
beach: I like to believe that there are great treasures there, which I
might find; and I know that the green and brown and spotty appearance of
the water is caused by the showing through of the pavements of courts,
and marble floors of palaces, which might vanish if I went nearer, such
a place of illusion is this.

The Villa Nardi stands in pleasant relations to Vesuvius, which is just
across the bay, and is not so useless as it has been represented; it
is our weather-sign and prophet. When the white plume on his top floats
inland, that is one sort of weather; when it streams out to sea, that is
another. But I can never tell which is which: nor in my experience does
it much matter; for it seems impossible for Sorrento to do anything but
woo us with gentle weather. But the use of Vesuvius, after all, is
to furnish us a background for the violet light at sundown, when the
villages at its foot gleam like a silver fringe. I have become convinced
of one thing: it is always best when you build a house to have it front
toward a volcano, if you can. There is just that lazy activity about a
volcano, ordinarily, that satisfies your demand for something that is
not exactly dead, and yet does not disturb you.

Sometimes when I wake in the night,--though I don't know why one ever
wakes in the night, or the daytime either here,--I hear the bell of the
convent, which is in our demesne,--a convent which is suppressed, and
where I hear, when I pass in the morning, the humming of a school. At
first I tried to count the hour; but when the bell went on to strike
seventeen, and even twenty-one o'clock, the absurdity of the thing came
over me, and I wondered whether it was some frequent call to prayer for
a feeble band of sisters remaining, some reminder of midnight penance
and vigil, or whether it was not something more ghostly than that, and
was not responded to by shades of nuns, who were wont to look out from
their narrow latticed windows upon these same gardens, as long ago as
when the beautiful Queen Joanna used to come down here to repent--if she
ever did repent--of her wanton ways in Naples.

On one side of the garden is a suppressed monastery. The narrow front
towards the sea has a secluded little balcony, where I like to fancy
the po