In the middle is a green garth [Footnote: Garth: an inclosure, a yard.]
with cypresses and yews dotted about; and when you look up you see the
blue sky cut square, and the hot tiles of a huge dome staring up into
it. Round the cloister walk are discreet brown doors, and by the side of
each door a brass plate tells you the name and titles of the Canon who
lives behind it. It is on the principle of Dean's yard at Westminster;
only here there are more Canons--and more cats.

The Canons live under the cloister; the cats live on the green garth,
and sometimes die there. I did not see much of the Canons; but the cats
seemed to me very sad--depressed, nostalgic even, might describe them,
if there had not been something more languid, something faded and
spiritless about their habit. It was not that they quarrelled. I heard
none of those long-drawn wails, gloomy yet mellow soliloquies, with
which our cats usher in the crescent moon or hymn her when she swims at
the full: there lacked even that comely resignation we may see on any
sunny window-ledge at home;--the rounded back and neatly ordered tail,
the immaculate fore-paws peering sedately below the snowy chest, the
squeezed-up eyes which so resolutely shut off a bleak and (so to say)
unenlightened world. That is pensiveness, sedate chastened melancholy;
but it is soothing, it speaks a philosophy, and a certain balancing of
pleasures and pains. In San Lorenzo cloister, when I looked in one hot
noon seeking a refuge from the glare and white dust of the city, I was
conscious of a something sinister that forbade such an even existence
for the smoothest tempered cat. There were too many of them for
companionship and perhaps too few for the humour of the thing to strike
them: in and out the chilly shades they stalked gloomily, hither and
thither like lank and unquiet ghosts of starved cats. They were of all
colours--gay orange-tawny, tortoise shell with the becoming white patch
over one eye, delicate tints of grey and fawn and lavender, brindle,