This reminded me
that I was now in Peter's patrimony,--the holy land of Romanism; and
where, it was presumed, the wayfarer would catch the spirit of devotion
from the soil and air. The hour of prayer might be past,--I know not;
but I saw no one in these oratories. Little shrines were perched upon
the trees, formed sometimes of boards, at others simply of the cavity of
the trunk; while the boughs were bent so as to form a canopy over them.
Little images and pictures had been stuck into these shrines; but the
rooks,--these black republicans,--like the "reds" at Rome, had waged a
war for possession, and, pitching overboard the little gods that
occupied them, were inhabiting in their room. The "great powers" were
too busy, or had been so, in the restoration of greater personages, to
take up the quarrel of these minor divinities. A strange silence and
dreariness brooded over the region. The land seemed keeping its
Sabbaths. The fields rested,--the villages were asleep,--the road was
untrodden. Had one been dropt from the clouds, he would have concluded
that it was but a century or so since the Flood, and that these were the
rude primitive great-grandchildren of Noah, who had just found their way
into these parts, and were slowly emerging from barbarism. The fields
around afforded little indication of such an instrument as the plough;
and one would have concluded from the garments of the people, that the
loom was among the yet uninvented arts. The harnessings of the horses
formed a curiously tangled web of thong, and rope, and thread, twisted,
tied, and knotted. It would have puzzled OEdipus himself to discover
how a horse could ever be got into such gear, or, being in, how it ever
could be got out. There seemed a most extraordinary number of beggars
and vagabonds in Peter's patrimony. A little congregation of these
worthies waited our arrival at every village, and whined round us for
alms so long as we remained. Others, not quite so ragged, stood aloof,
regarding us fixedly, as if devising some pretext on which to claim a
paul of us. There were worse characters in the neighbourhood, though
happily we saw none of them. But at certain intervals we met the
Austrian patrol, whose duty it was to clear the road of brigands. Peter,
it appeared to us, kept strange company about him,--idlers, beggars,
vagabonds, and brigands. It must vex the good man much to find his dear
children disgracing him so in the eyes of strangers.

These di