that flourish, rank and wild, no longer
cared for by pious and loving hands. From the rough road that climbs the
mountains to Assunto, the convent is invisible, a gnarled and ragged
olive grove intervening, and a spur of cliffs as well, while from
Palermo one sees only the speck of white, flashing in the sun,
indistinguishable from the many similar gleams of desert monastery or
pauper village.

Partly because of this seclusion, partly by reason of its extreme
beauty, partly, it may be, because the present owners are more than
charming and gracious in their pressing hospitality, Sta. Catarina seems
to preserve an element of the poetic, almost magical; and as I drove
with the Cavaliere Valguanera one evening in March out of Palermo, along
the garden valley of the Oreto, then up the mountain side where the warm
light of the spring sunset swept across from Monreale, lying golden and
mellow on the luxuriant growth of figs, and olives, and orange-trees,
and fantastic cacti, and so up to where the path of the convent swung
off to the right round a dizzy point of cliff that reached out gaunt and
gray from the olives below,--as I drove thus in the balmy air, and saw
of a sudden a vision of creamy walls and orange roofs, draped in
fantastic festoons of roses, with a single curving palm-tree stuck black
and feathery against the gold sunset, it is hardly to be wondered at
that I should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment, looking for a
time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm of a summer dream.

The Cavaliere had introduced himself to us,--Tom Rendel and me,--one
morning soon after we reached Palermo, when, in the first bewilderment
of architects in this paradise of art and color, we were working nobly
at our sketches in that dream of delight, the Capella Palatina. He was
himself an amateur archaeologist, he told us, and passionately devoted to
his island; so he felt impelled to speak to any one whom he saw
appreciating the almost--and in a way fortunately--unknown beauties of
Palermo. In a little time we were fully acquainted, and talking like the
oldest friends. Of course he knew acquaintances of Rendel's,--some one
always does: this time they were officers on the tubby U. S. S.
"Quinebaug," that, during the summer of 1888, was trying to uphold the
maritime honor of the United States in European waters. Luckily for us,
one of the officers was a kind of cousin of Rendel's, and came from
Baltimore as well, so, as he had