“The place is in decay and is an excellent specimen of their monastic buildings.  It is now in as romantic a state as the most poetic imagination could desire.  Here are gloomy halls and dark and decayed rooms; long corridors of chambers, uninhabited except by the lizard and the bat; terraces upon the brow of stupendous precipices; gloomy cells with grated windows, and subterranean apartments and caverns.  Remains of rude frescoes stain the crumbling ceiling, and ivy and various wild plants hang down from the opening crevices and cover the tops of the broken walls.

“A rude sundial, without a gnomon, is almost obliterated from the wall of the cloisters, but its motto, ’Dies nostri quasi umbra super terram et nulli est mora’, still resists the effects of decay, as if to serve the appropriate purpose of the convent’s epitaph.  At the foot of the long stairs in the great hall is the ruined chapel, its altar broken up and despoiled of its pictures and ornaments.

“We were called to dinner by our host, who was accompanied by his wife, a very pretty woman, two children, the elder carried by the mother, the younger by the old grandparent, an old man of upwards of eighty, who seemed quite pleased with his burden and delighted to show us his charge.  The whole family quite prepossessed us in their favor; there seemed to be an unusual degree of affection displayed by the members towards each other which we could not but remark at the time.  Our dining apartment was the old domus refectionis of the convent, as its name, written over the door which led into the choir, manifested.  After an excellent dinner we retired to our chambers for the night.

“Tuesday, July 27. We all rested but badly last night.  The heat was excessive, the insects, especially mosquitoes, exceedingly troublesome, and the sound of the waves, as they beat against the rocks and chafed the beach in the gusty night, and the howling of the wind, which for a time moaned through the deserted chambers of the convent, all made us restless.  I rose several times in the night and, opening my window, looked out on the dark waters of the bay, till the dawn over the mountains warned me that the time for sleep was passing away, and I again threw myself on the bed to rest.  But scarcely had I lost myself in sleep before the sound of loud voices below and wailings again waked me.  I looked out of my window on the balcony below; it was filled with armed men; soldiers and others like brigands with muskets were in hurried commotion, calling to each other from the balcony and from the terraced steps below.