I went, one day, through a long, sloping arch, near the sailors’ Chapel of St. Antonino, past a pretty shrine of the Virgin, down the zigzag path to this little marina; but it is better to be content with looking at it from above, and imagining how delightful it would be to push off in one of the little tubs of boats.  Sometimes, at night, I hear the fishermen coming home, singing in their lusty fashion; and I think it is a good haven to arrive at.  I never go down to search for stones on the beach:  I like to believe that there are great treasures there, which I might find; and I know that the green and brown and spotty appearance of the water is caused by the showing through of the pavements of courts, and marble floors of palaces, which might vanish if I went nearer, such a place of illusion is this.

The Villa Nardi stands in pleasant relations to Vesuvius, which is just across the bay, and is not so useless as it has been represented; it is our weather-sign and prophet.  When the white plume on his top floats inland, that is one sort of weather; when it streams out to sea, that is another.  But I can never tell which is which:  nor in my experience does it much matter; for it seems impossible for Sorrento to do anything but woo us with gentle weather.  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.

On one side of the garden is a suppressed monastery.  The narrow front towards the sea has a secluded little balcony, where I like to fancy the poor orphaned souls used to steal out at night for a breath of fresh air, and perhaps to see, as I did one dark evening, Naples with its lights like a conflagration on the horizon.  Upon the tiles of the parapet are cheerful devices, the crossbones tied with a cord, and the like.  How many heavy-hearted recluses have stood in that secluded nook, and been tempted by the sweet, lulling sound of the waves below; how many have paced along this narrow terrace, and felt like prisoners who wore paths in the stone floor where they trod; and how many stupid louts have walked there, insensible to all the charm of it!