The town below was crowded.

The service was one of the chief ones in the year, but somehow or other the people stopped away.
When the music was over, I was shown through the convent.

There were, as usual, the stock marvels: a hole through which you looked and beheld a--shall I call it sacred ?--picture of Satan with horns and hoof complete; a small plot of ground, where used to grow the thorns on which St Benedict was wont to roll himself in order to quench the desires of manhood, and where now grow the roses into which St Francis transformed the said thorns, in honour of his brother saint.

The monk who showed me the building talked much about the misery of the surrounding poor.

At the convent's foot lies a little wood of dark green ilexes, of almost unknown age, valued on account of some tradition about St Benedict, and perhaps still more as forming a kind of oasis on the barren, bare mountain-side.