the son of the former French ambassador, upon the horses with which they came to the ground. It was a match made up on the spot. The Frenchman was so palpably better mounted, that there was a general laugh when the ground was cleared and the two gentlemen spurred up and down to show themselves as antagonists. The Parisian himself stuffed his white handkerchief in his bosom, and jammed down his hat upon his head with a confident laugh, and among the ladies there was scarce a bet upon the grave Scotchman, who borrowed a stout whip, and rode his bony animal between the lines with a hard rein and his feet set firmly in the stirrups. The Frenchman generously gave him every advantage, beginning with the inside of the ring. The bell struck, and the Scotchman drove his spurs into his horse's flanks and started away, laying on with his whip most industriously. His opponent followed, riding very gracefully, but apparently quite sure that he could overtake him at any moment, and content for the first round with merely showing himself off to the best advantage. Round came Sawney, twenty leaps ahead, whipping unmercifully still; the blood of his hired hack completely up, and himself as red in the face as an aldermen, and with his eye fixed only on the road. The long-tailed bay of the Frenchman came after, in handsome style, his rider sitting complacently upright, and gathering up his reins for the first time to put his horse to his speed. The Scotchman flogged on. The Frenchman had disdained to take a whip, but he drove his heels hard into his horse's sides soon after leaving the post, and leaned forward quite in earnest. The horses did remarkably well, both showing much more bottom than was expected. On they came, the latter gaining a little and working very hard. Sawney had lost his hat, and his red hair streamed back from his redder face;

but flogging and spurring, with his teeth shut and his eyes steadily fixed on the road, he kept the most of his ground and rode away. They passed me a horse's length apart, and the Scotchman's whip flying to the last, disappeared beyond me. He won the race by a couple of good leaps at least. The king was very much amused, and rode off laughing heartily, and the discomfitted Frenchman came back to his party with a very illconcealed dissatisfaction.

A very amusing race followed between two midshipmen from an English corvette lying in the bay, and then the long lines of splendid equipages wheeled into train, and dashed off the ground. The road, after leaving the campo, runs along the edge of the range of hills, enclosing the city, and just below, within a high white wall, lies the public burial-place of Naples. I had read so many barrowing descriptions of this spot, that my curiosity rose as we drove along in sight of it, and requesting my friends to set me down, I joined an American of my acquaintance, and we started to visit it together.

An old man opened the iron door, and we entered a clean, spacious, and well-paved area, with long rows of iron rings in the heavy slabs of the pavement. Without asking a question, the old man walked across to the farther corner, where stood a moveable lever, and fastening the chain into the fixture, raised the massive stone cover of a pit. He requested us to stand back for a few minutes to give the effluvia time to escape, and then, sheltering our eyes with our hats, we looked in. You have read, of course, that there are three hundred and sixty-five pits in this place, one of which is opened every day for the dead of the city. They are thrown in without shroud or coffin, and the pit is sealed up at night for a year. They are thirty or forty feet

deep, and each would contain perhaps two hundred bodies. Lime is thrown upon the daily heap, and it soon melts into a mass of garbage, and by the end of the year the bottom of the pit is covered with dry white bones.

It was some time before we could distinguish anything in the darkness of the abyss. Fixing my eyes on one spot, however, the outlines of a body became defined gradually, and in a few minutes, sheltering my eyes completely from the sun above, I could see all the horrors of the scene but too distinctly. Eight corpses, all of grown persons, lay in a confused heap together, as they had been thrown in one after another in the course of the day. The last was a powerfully made, gray old man, who had fallen flat on his back, with his right hand lying across and half covering the face of a woman. By his full limbs and chest, and the darker color of his legs below the knee, he was probably one of the lazzaroni, and had met with a sudden death. His right heel lay on the forehead of a young man, emaciated to the last degree, his chest thrown up as he lay, and his ribs showing like a skeleton covered with skin. The close black curls of the latter, as his head rested on another body, were in such streng relief that I could have counted them. Off to the right, quite distinct from the heap, lay, in a beautiful attitude, a girl, as well as I could judge, of not more than nineteen or twenty. She had fallen on the pile and rolled or slid away. Her hair was very long, and covered her left shoulder and bosom; her arm was across her body, and if her mother had laid her down to sleep, she could not have disposed her limbs more decently. The head had fallen a little away to the right, and the feet, which were small, even for a lady, were pressed one against the other, as if she were about turning on her side. The sexton said that a

young man had come with the body, and was very ill for some time after it was thrown in. We asked him if respectable people were brought here. "Yes," he said, "many. None but the rich would go to the expense of a separate grave for their relations. People were often brought in handsome grave-clothes, but they were always stripped before they were left. The shroud, whenever there was one, was the perquisite of the undertakers." And thus are flung into this noisome pit, like beasts, the greater part of the population of this vast city-the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous together, without the decency even of a rag to keep up the distinctions of life! Can human beings thus be thrown away ?-men like ourselves— women, children, like our sisters and brothers? I never was so humiliated in my life as by this horrid spectacle. I did not think a man—a felon even, or a leper-what you will that is guilty or debased-I did not think anything that had been human could be so recklessly abandoned. Pah! It makes one sick at heart! God grant I may never die at Naples !

While we were recovering from our disgust, the old man lifted the stone from the pit destined to receive the dead on the following day. We looked in. The bottom was strewn with bones, already fleshless and dry. He wished us to see the dead of several previous days, but my stomach was already tried to its utmost. We paid our gratuity, and hurried away. A few steps from the gate, we met a man bearing a coffin on his head. Seeing that we came from the cemetery, he asked us if we wished to look into it. He set it down, and the lid opening with a hinge, we were horror-struck with the sight of seven dead infants! The youngest was at least three months old, the eldest perhaps a year; and they lay heaped together like so many puppies, one

or two of them spotted with disease, and all wasted to baby-skeletons. While we were looking at them, six or seven noisy children ran out from a small house at the road-side and surrounded the coffin. One was a fine girl of twelve years of age, and instead of being at all shocked at the sight, she lifted the whitest of the dead things, and looked at its face very earnestly, loading it with all the tenderest diminutives of the language. The others were busy in pointing to those they thought had been prettiest, and none of them betrayed fear or disgust. In answer to a question of my friend about the marks of disease, the man rudely pulled out one by the foot that lay below the rest, and holding it up to show the marks upon it, tossed it again carelessly into the coffin. He had brought them from the hospital for infants, and they had died that morning. The coffin was worn with use. He shut down the lid, and lifting it again upon his head, went on to the cemetery, to empty it like so much offal upon the heap we had seen!

I have been struck repeatedly with the little value attached to human life in Italy. I have seen several of these housless lazzaroni literally dying in the streets, and no one curious enough to look at them. The most dreadful sufferings, the most despairing cries, in the open squares, are passed as unnoticed as the howling of a dog. The day before yesterday, a woman fell in the Toledo, in a fit, frothing at the mouth, and livid with pain; and though the street was so crowded that one could make his way with difficulty, three or four ragged children were the only persons even looking at her.