ned, to prevent infection; and there
are their remains to this day, manuring the vineyards around the walls.
I wonder if the evening breezes, as they blow over the Janiculum, don't
waft across the odour to the Vatican.

Let us descend the hill, and re-enter the city. There is a class of
buildings which you cannot fail to note, and which at first you take to
be prisons. They are large, gloomy-looking houses, of from three to
four stories, with massive doors, and windows closed with strong upright
iron stanchions, crossed with horizontal bars, forming a network of iron
of so close a texture, that scarce a pigeon could squeeze itself
through. Ah, there, you say, the brigand or the Mazzinist groans! No;
the place is a convent. It is the dwelling, not of crime, but of
"heavenly meditation." The beings that live there are so perfectly
happy, so glad to have escaped from the evil world outside, and so
delighted with their paradise, that not one of them would leave it,
though you should open these doors, and tear away these iron bars. So
the priests say. Is it not strange, then, to confine with bolt and bar
beings who intend anything but escape? and is it not, to say the least,
a needless waste of iron, in a country where iron is so very scarce and
so very dear? It would be worth while making the trial, if only for a
summer's day, of opening these doors, and astonishing Rome with the
great amount of happiness within it, of which, meanwhile, it has not the
least idea. I have seen the dignitaries entering, but no glimpse could I
obtain of the interior; for immediately behind the strong outer door is
an inner one, and how many more I know not. Mr Seymour has told us of a
nun, while he was in Rome, who found her way out through all these doors
and bars; but, instead of fleeing back into her paradise, she rushed
straight to the Tiber, and sought death beneath its floods.

But although I never was privileged to see the interior of a Roman
convent, I saw on one occasion the inmates of these paradises. During my
sojourn in that city, it was announced that the nuns of a certain
convent were to sing at Ave Maria, in a church adjoining the Piazza di
Spagna; and I went thither to hear them. The choristers I did not see;
they sat in a remote gallery, behind a screen. Their voices, which in
clearness and brilliancy of tone surpassed the finest instruments, now
rose into an overpowering melodious burst, and now died away into the
sweetest, s