“While perplexed in conjecturing the meaning of what I saw, Mr. C. called at my door requesting me to rise, as the whole house was in agitation at a terrible accident which had occurred in the night.  Dressing in great haste, I went into the contiguous room and, looking out of the window down upon a terrace some thirty feet below, saw the lifeless body of a man, with spots of blood upon his clothes, lying across the font of water.  A police officer with a band of men appeared, taking down in writing the particulars for a report.  On enquiry I found that the body was that of the old man, the father of our host, whom we had seen the evening before in perfect health.  He had the dangerous habit of walking in his sleep and had jumped, it is supposed, in that state out of his chamber window which was directly beneath us; at what time in the night was uncertain.  His body must have been beneath me while I was looking from my window in the night.

“Our host, but particularly his brother, seemed for a time almost inconsolable.  The lamentations of the latter over the bloody body (as they were laying it out in the room where we had the evening before dined), calling upon his father and mingling his cries with a chant to the Virgin and to the saints, were peculiarly plaintive, and, sounding through the vacant halls of the convent, made a melancholy impression upon us all....  Soon after breakfast we went downstairs; several priests and funeral attendants had arrived; the poor old man was laid upon a bed, the room darkened, and four wax-lights burned, two each side of the bed.  A short time was taken in preparation, and then upon a bier borne by four bearers, a few preceding it with wax-lights, the body, with the face exposed, as is usual in Italy, was taken down the steep pathway to its long home.

“I could not help remarking the total want of that decent deportment in all those officiating which marks the conduct of those that attend the interment of the dead in our own country.  Even the priests ’seemed to be in high glee, talking and heartily laughing with each other; at what it perplexed me to conjecture.

“I went into the room in which the old man had slept; all was as he had left it.  Over the head of the bed were the rude prints of the Virgin and saints, which are so common in all the houses of Italy, and which are supposed to act as charms by these superstitious people.  The lamp was on the window ledge where he had placed it, and his scanty wardrobe upon a chair by the bedside.  Over the door was a sprig of laurel, placed there since his death.

“The accident of the morning threw a gloom over the whole day; we, however, commenced our sketches from different parts of the convent, and I commenced a picture, a view of Amalfi from the interior of the grotto.”

Several of the notebooks are here missing, and from the next in order we find that the travellers must have lingered in or near Sorrento until August 30, when they returned to Naples.