hollow square, with a cloistered walk around the inside looking upon a
garden.

The portal at which Agnes and her grandmother knocked, after ascending
the winding staircase cut in the precipice, opened through an arched
passage into this garden.

As the ponderous door swung open, it was pleasant to hear the lulling
sound of a fountain, which came forth with a gentle patter, like that
of soft summer rain, and to see the waving of rose-bushes and golden
jessamines, and smell the perfumes of orange-blossoms mingling with
those of a thousand other flowers.

The door was opened by an odd-looking portress. She might be
seventy-five or eighty; her cheeks were of the color of very yellow
parchment drawn in dry wrinkles; her eyes were those large, dark,
lustrous ones so common in her country, but seemed, in the general decay
and shrinking of every other part of her face, to have acquired a wild,
unnatural appearance; while the falling away of her teeth left nothing
to impede the meeting of her hooked nose with her chin. Add to this, she
was hump-backed, and twisted in her figure; and one needs all the force
of her very good-natured, kindly smile to redeem the image of poor old
Jocunda from association with that of some Thracian witch, and cause one
to see in her the appropriate portress of a Christian institution.

Nevertheless, Agnes fell upon her neck and imprinted a very fervent kiss
upon what was left of her withered cheek, and was repaid by a shower of
those epithets of endearment which in the language of Italy fly thick
and fast as the petals of the orange-blossom from her groves.