of the nuns who mortify their flesh, fast, pray and
weep? No lesson at all—nothing save
mockery and contempt. To a girl in the heyday
of youth and beauty the life of a religieuse seems
ridiculous. “The poor nuns!” she says,
with a laugh; “they are so ignorant. Their
time is over—mine has not yet begun.”
Few, very few, among the thousands of young women who
leave the scene of their quiet schooldays for the
social whirligig of the world, ever learn to take
life in earnest, love in earnest, sorrow in earnest.
To most of them life is a large dressmaking and millinery
establishment; love a question of money and diamonds;
sorrow a solemn calculacalculation as to how much or
how little mourning is considered becoming or fashionable.
And for creatures such as these we men work—work
till our hairs are gray and our backs bent with toil—work
till all the joy and zest of living has gone from
us, and our reward is—what? Happiness?—seldom.
Infidelity?—often. Ridicule? Truly
we ought to be glad if we are only ridiculed and thrust
back to occupy the second place in our own houses;
our lady-wives call that “kind treatment.”
Is there a married woman living who does not now and
then throw a small stone of insolent satire at her
husband when his back is turned? What, madame?
You, who read these words—you say with indignation:
“Certainly there is, and
I am that woman!”
Ah, truly? I salute you profoundly!—you
are, no doubt, the one exception!
Avellino is one of those dreamy, quiet and picturesque
towns which have not as yet been desecrated by the
Vandal tourist. Persons holding “through
tickets” from Messrs. Cook or Gaze do not stop
there—there are no “sights”
save the old sanctuary called Monte Virgine standing
aloft on its rugged hill, with all the memories of
its ancient days clinging to it like a wizard’s
cloak, and wrapping it in a sort of mysterious meditative
silence. It can look back through a vista of
eventful years to the eleventh century, when it was
erected, so the people say, on the ruins of a temple
of Cybele. But what do the sheep and geese that
are whipped abroad in herds by the drovers Cook and
Gaze know of Monte Virgine or Cybele? Nothing—
and they care less; and quiet Avellino escapes from
their depredations, thankful that it is not marked
on the business map of the drovers’ “Runs.”
Shut in by the lofty Apennines, built on the slope
of the hill that winds gently down into a green and
fruitful valley through which the river Sabato rushes
and gleams white against cleft rocks that look like
war-worn and deserted castles, a drowsy peace encircles
it, and a sort of stateliness, which, compared with
the riotous fun and folly of Naples only thirty miles
away, is as though the statue of a nude Egeria were
placed in rivalry with the painted waxen image of
a half-dressed ballet-dancer. Few lovelier sights
are to be seen in nature than a sunset from one of
Print
Word
PDF
