But although I never was privileged to see the interior of a Roman convent, I saw on one occasion the inmates of these paradises. During my sojourn in that city, it was announced that the nuns of a certain convent were to sing at Ave Maria, in a church adjoining the Piazza di Spagna; and I went thither to hear them. The choristers I did not see; they sat in a remote gallery, behind a screen. Their voices, which in clearness and brilliancy of tone surpassed the finest instruments, now rose into an overpowering melodious burst, and now died away into the sweetest, softest whispers. Within the low rail, their faces fronting the altar, and their backs turned on the audience, sat a row of spectres. Start not, reader; spectres they were,--fleshless, bloodless spectres. I saw them enter: they came like the sheeted dead; they wore long white dresses; their faces were pale and livid, like those that look out upon you from coffins; their forms were thin and wasted, and cast scarce a shadow as they passed between you and the beams of the sinking sun. Their eyes they lifted not, but kept them steadfastly fixed on the ground, over which they crept noiselessly as shadows creep. They sat mute and moveless, as if they had been statues of cold marble, all the while these brilliant notes were rolling above them. But I observed they were closely watched by the priests. There were several beside the altar; and whichever it was who happened for the moment to be disengaged, he turned round, and stood regarding the nuns with that stern anxious look with which one seeks to control a mastiff or a maniac. Were the priests afraid that, if withdrawn for a moment from the influence of their eye, a wail of woe would burst forth from these poor creatures? The last hallelujah had been pealed forth,--the shades of eve were thickening among the aisles,--when the priests gave the signal to the nuns. They rose, they moved; and, with eyes which were not lifted for a moment from the floor on which they trod, they disappeared by the same private door by which they had entered. I have seen gangs of galley slaves,--I have seen the husbands and sons of Rome led away manacled into banishment,--I have seen men standing beneath the gallows; but never did I see so woe-struck a group as this. Than have gone back with these nuns to their "paradise," as it is cruelly termed, I felt that I would rather have lain, where the lost nun is, in the Tiber.