Jane at the thought of it became quite dangerously violent. She insisted upon digging up the Eighteenth Century and beating it to death again with its own dusty old wig, and was soothed and calmed only by being taken outside to look once more by daylight at the delicious marble mince of fragments which the Hotel Bellevue has built into its portals—Greek and Roman capitals upside down; marble lambs and crosses, gargoyles, and corbels adorning the sides and lintels in a charming confusion of styles, periods, and purposes. Ravello, as are all these arid ancient towns from which the tides of life have drained away, is as dry and empty as an old last year’s nut; a mere hollow shell, ridged and parched, out of which the kernel of existence has vanished. A tattered, rosy-cheeked child runs up the uncertain footway—the stair-streets—with feet as light and sure as a goat’s. An old, old man, with head and jaws bound in a dirty red kerchief, and with the keen hawk-like profile of some far-off Saracen ancestry, crouches in a doorway with an outstretched hand. He makes no appeal, but his apparent confidence that his age 33and helplessness will touch them, does touch them, and they search their pockets hastily for coppers, with a faint anguished sense of the thin shadow of a dial-finger which for them too creeps round and round, as for this old derelict man, for this old skeleton city.... A donkey heaped with brushwood patters up the steep narrow way; so narrow that they must flatten themselves against the wall to admit of his stolidly sorrowful passage. They may come and go, as all the others have come and gone, but our brother, the ass, is always there, recking not of Greek or Roman, of American or Tedeschi; for all of them he bears burdens with the same sorrowful stolidity, and from none does he receive any gratitude.... These are the only inhabitants of Ravello they see until they reach the Piazza and the Cathedral of Saint Pantaleone. They know beforehand that the Cathedral too has been spoiled and desecrated, but there still remain the fine bronze doors by the same Barisanus who made the famous ones in the church at Monreale in Sicily, and here they find the most beautiful of the pulpits, and the very biggest Jonah and the very biggest whale in all Ravello.