pinned against the wall. "We may sit up till twelve o'clock, if we
like," said the nun; "but we have no fire and candle, and so what's the
use of sitting up? When we have said our prayers we are glad enough to
go to sleep."

I forget, although the good soul told us, how many times in the day,
in public and in private, these devotions are made, but fancy that the
morning service in the chapel takes place at too early an hour for most
easy travellers. We did not fail to attend in the evening, when likewise
is a general muster of the seven hundred, minus the absent and sick, and
the sight is not a little curious and striking to a stranger.

The chapel is a very big whitewashed place of worship, supported by half
a dozen columns on either side, over each of which stands the statue
of an Apostle, with his emblem of martyrdom. Nobody was as yet at the
distant altar, which was too far off to see very distinctly; but I could
perceive two statues over it, one of which (St. Laurence, no doubt) was
leaning upon a huge gilt gridiron that the sun lighted up in a blaze--a
painful but not a romantic instrument of death. A couple of old ladies
in white hoods were tugging and swaying about at two bell-ropes that
came down into the middle of the church, and at least five hundred
others in white veils were seated all round about us in mute
contemplation until the service began, looking very solemn, and white,
and ghastly, like an army of tombstones by moonlight.

The service commenced as the clock finished striking seven: the organ
pealed out, a very cracked and old one, and presently some weak old
voice from the choir overhead quavered out a canticle; which done,
a thin old voice of a priest at the altar far off (and which had now
become quite gloomy in the sunset) chanted feebly another part of the