ght they read them? Yes, but only on
asking the Abbess. Terror of nun lest Antonia and I should go on or
into anything not mentioned in our permit--the impression that in this
life all can be done, but done only by permission. "Men allowed to
visit?" Only by permission of Cardinal Segretario di Stato. "Men
working in garden, masons, &c.?" Yes, but always with special
permission; permission and bars!

In all these corridors and stairs not a creature; only at one moment a
door stirred, Antonia thought she saw a nun?? Little garden, with box
hedges and lemon-trees. The inner windows (cells) open on this garden,
are large, ordinary, and without bars. There was even one long ground
floor window with a little balcony and steps with a cat on them. But
never a soul! Great bareness, fair neatness, and order.

The gilt box of the choir, looking down into church; the stalls; the
Abbess's gold-headed crozier stuck into her stall (St. Cecilia with
harp in it), two lecterns with Latin lessons of the day--the day's
martyrology.

_April_ 22.

VI.

COLONNA GARDENS.

With Contessa Z. to-day in Colonna Gardens. Great surprise on finding
them more romantic than from the outside. A terrace, with all Rome,
blond; all manner of unexpected towers and cupolas. The pines of the
Janiculum, staircase fountains, waterless but noisy, the Roman veil of
vegetation everywhere; and great vague walls of spaliered roses and
lemons. In the midst of these terraces and balustrades and crowded
nurseries of flowers, the surprise of finding that that great vague
building I have noticed from below is a ruin, roofless, full of wild
fig, a castle's square keep. Mediaeval? antique? the place surely
whence the imaginary Nero watched the burning, and harped!

_April_ 25.

VII.

PALO.

Palo Beach yesterday; motored there by my French friends. I have had
fever some days past, and there was more than mere pleasure and
amusement in sitting on the sand and breathing the clean cloudless
sea-air, instead of the scirocco stuff we had left, alternately
simmering and shivering in Rome. By the way, how little the sea gives
to Rome (except at the Aventine corner sometimes by a violent
libeccio), and how one feels the futility of this tideless
Mediterranean, unable to purify or renovate even a few yards of the
inland! Think of the estuaries of the North! of the cleansing
vivifying tides and draughts which the ocean thrusts into the very
vitals of t