In the college adjoining the church there were a year ago but fifteen monks, and no others are admitted.  When these fifteen shall be dead the convent—­Sacro Collegio they call it—­will pass entirely into the hands of the government, which now uses the greater part of it for a school for the sons of poor teachers, who are sent here from all parts of Italy.

Accompanied by a professor of the college, we went over that part of the building not appropriated to the monks.  It is a little town in itself, and has something of the variety and contrasts of a town.  To go from the vast refectory to that upper part of the building called the Ghetto, with its interminable low and narrow corridor and lines of little chambers, is to see the two extremes of which building is capable.

Without intending to write a statistical article, I may give a few of the dimensions we took note of.  The refectory is one hundred and ninety feet long and forty wide, and is capable of seating at table five hundred persons.  The tables run around the room, with a single row of seats against the wall, and are served from the centre of the hall.  Quite across one end extends a painting of the Last Supper.  At one side is a tiny pulpit, from which in the old time one would read aloud while the monks ate.

The infirmary and rooms used for storing articles in ordinary use occupy twenty large chambers.  The five elementary school-rooms are each fifty feet square, the kitchen is eighty-three feet square, and the fencing-hall and garden adjoining contain together over sixty-six hundred square feet.  The cistern under the cloister is of nearly the same size.

There is water in profusion—­in the court, the kitchen, the boys’ wash-rooms, wherever it can be needed.  In the entry from the principal court is an odd fourteenth-century fountain which is a perfect calendar.  It is set against the wall, and is in twelve compartments, answering to the twelve months of the year.  In the frieze above are carved roses, red stone on a white ground—­in some compartments thirty, in others thirty-one, answering to the days of the month.  All the fountains are made of the crimson-and-white stone of Asisi, which is seen everywhere about the city—­in vases for holy water, in pavements, in garden-walls, in the foundations of houses.  The stone, a red sandstone, is found in plenty in the adjoining mountains, and has a rich, soft crimson hue with irregular lines of white.  But it is very hard to work, and could scarcely be made to pay the expense of the necessary machinery.

“For what I should have to pay for a bath of red marble, about one hundred lire (twenty dollars),” said the Count B——­ to me, “I could buy a bath of Carrara.”

“Baths of crimson marble and of Carrara!” I thought, and remembered with an involuntary shudder my dear native zinc.