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.
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