st acknowledge that our New
World ideas are deficient. We have spacious rooms, broad windows, high
ceilings, but such a stairway as this is beyond us."

The empty sunny rooms above were gayly painted in fresco. At one end of
the house a door opened into a little latticed balcony, into which we
stepped, finding ourselves in an adjoining church, high up on the wall
at one side of the altar. Here the Sisters came to pray, and as we
departed, one of them glided in and knelt down in the dusky corner.

"Perhaps she is going to pray for us," said Inness.

"I am sure we need it," replied Janet, seriously.

In the garret was a Sedan-chair, once elaborately gilded.

"I suppose they went down to Ventimiglia in that," said Baker--"those
fine old dames below."

From one of the rooms on the second floor opened a little cell or
closet, part of whose flooring had been removed, showing a hollow space
beneath following the massive exterior wall.

[Illustration: PIFFERARI]

"Here," said the Mother Superior, "the papers of the family were
concealed at the approach of the first Napoleon, and not taken out for a
number of years. The flooring has never been replaced."

The Mother Superior spoke only Italian, which Verney translated, much to
the envy of the younger men. The Professor was not with us, for as soon
as he learned that the place was "papist" he departed, although Inness
suggested that the street was papist also, and likewise the very air
must be redolent of Rome. But the Professor was an example of "coelum,
non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt," and quite determined to be
as Protestant in Italy as he was in Connecticut. He would not desert his
colors because under a foreign sky, as so many Americans desert them.

The Mother now conducted us to a little square parlor, with south
windows opening upon a balcony full of pots of flowers; the walls and
ceiling of this little room were glowing with color--paintings in fresco
more suited to the Dorias, I fancy, than to the "Sisters of the Snow,"
for this was the poetical name of the little black-robed band. In this
worldly little room we found wine waiting for us, and grapes which were
almost raisins: we had never seen them in transition before. The wine
was excellent, and Mrs. Trescott partook with much graciousness. After
partaking, she employed Verney in translating to the Mother a number of
her own characteristic sentences. But Verney must have altered them
somewhat en