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His house smiles serenely modern even if only pseudo-classic contempt on all the quaint duskiness and irregularity below, and is pillared, corniced, entablatured, and friezed, with lines severely straight, although the building itself is as round as any mediæval campanile and surmounted with a Gothic bell-turret, while the entrance-gate is turreted, machicolated, castellated, like the fortress-castles of the Goths.
On the face of the bell-turret a piece of eighth-century carving is fixed. The walls are now whitewashed, and the floor covered with red tiles. The round chapel to the left of the apse has a cupola with an oculus and a lantern at the top.
Peter's, at Rome, higher than the great pyramid of Ghizeh, higher than the iron bell-turret which now caps one of the towers of Rouen Cathedral, and which ought to be looked upon as the highest monument in the world.
The bare rafters were often profusely hung with dusty spiders' webs, and were the home also of countless swallows, that flew in and out of the open bell-turret.
"See the church," said Lady Temple, glad to divert the storm, and eagerly looking at the slender spire surmounting the bell-turret of a small building in early-decorated style, new, but somewhat stained by sea-wind, without having as yet acquired the tender tints of time. "How beautiful!" was her cry. "You were beginning the collection for it when I went away! How we used to wish for it."
There was a little grove of trees on either side of it; a flock of pigeons were wheeling about the bell-turret that rose into the clear blue sky, and from which came a stroke or two, announcing the approach of dinner-time as he went up the steps.
The first bells, for the lack of bell-towers, were sometimes hung on trees by the side of the meeting-houses, to the great amazement and distress of the Indians, who regarded them with superstitious dread, thinking to paraphrase Herbert's beautiful line "when the bell did chime 't was devils' music;" but more frequently the bells were hung in a belfry or bell-turret or "bellcony," and from this belfry depended a long bell-rope quite to the floor; and thus in the very centre of the church the sexton stood when he rung the summons for lire or for meeting.
The aqueduct the first constructed in Dalmatia in modern times is named the Lott-Brunnen, in commemoration of the clever engineer who designed it. Near the cathedral is the little church of S. Barbara; the bell-turret on the wall is used as its campanile.
For to-morrow there will be crowds everybody. You too, Monsieur, are coming perhaps? The Mass is at half-past six." Such was the living interest of the place that the traveller moved away without any very clear architectural impression of the Cathedral, except of the curiously narrow bell-turret and of the height of the dome.
Its brick walls are surmounted by Mansard roofs above which rises a bell-turret; a pillared portico, where Dickens sat with his family on summer evenings, shades the front entrance; wide bay-windows project upon either side; flowers and vines clamber upon the walls, and a delightfully home-like air pervades the place.
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