257Down each side of the broad tree-shadowed way, bordered on either hand by the little stone-built cubicles washed pink or white or blue, in which lived the multitudinous laundresses, ran a clear rushing brook. These brooks flowed through a sort of shallow tunnel with a wide orifice before each dwelling, and in every one of these openings was standing a bare-legged blanchisseuse, dealing strenuously with Palermian linen, with skirts tucked up above sturdy knees that were pink and fresh from the rush of the bright water. Vigorous girls trotted back and forth with large baskets heaped with wet garments, and bent, but still energetic, granddams spread the garments to dry. Hung them from the tree branches, swung them from the low eaves of the little dwellings, threaded them on lines that laced and crossed like spiderwebs, so that the whole vista was a flutter of fabrics—rose and white and green—dancing in the breeze. A human and homely scene, with play of brown arms and bright eyes amid the flying linen and laces; with sounds of rippling leaves, of calls and laughter, and the gurgling of quick water—drudgery that was half a frolic in the cheerful sunshine. Now behold Gaspero’s sense of dramatic contrast! A plain, frigid façade, guarded by a bearded and rather grubby monk in a brown robe. The eye does not linger upon the grubby monk, being led away instantly by the vista through the arched doorway behind him of a cloistered court; a court solemn with the dark spires of towering cypresses, and brilliant with roses—roses wine-coloured, golden, pink. Behind this screen of flowers and trees lies the bit of ground possessing the peculiar property of quickly desiccating and 258mummifying the human bodies buried in it. Many hundreds have been laid in this earth for awhile, and then removed to the convent crypts to make room for others. It is to these crypts another monk leads the way. A saturnine person this, handing his charges over to another, still more gloomy, who sits at the foot of the stairs and watches at the crypt’s entrance. A perfectly comprehensible depression, his, when one reflects that all the sunshiny hours of these golden Sicilian days he sits at the shadowed door of a great tomb, mounting guard over surely the most grisly charge the mind can conceive; over Death’s bitterest jest at Life. The walls of the high, clean corridors are lined with glass cases like a library, but instead of printed books the shelves are crammed with ghastly phantoms of humanity, all grinning in horrible, silent amusement as at a mordant, unutterable joke. Jane and Peripatetica gasp and clutch one another’s hand at the grey disorder of this soundless merriment—breathless, fixed, perpetual.