ial! The prisoner is never confronted with his accuser, or with the
impeaching witnesses. He is allowed no opportunity of disproving the
charge; sometimes he is not even informed what that charge is. He has no
means of defending his life. He has no doubt an advocate to defend him;
but the advocate is always nominated by the court, and is usually taken
from the partizans of the Government; and nothing would astonish him
more than that he should succeed in bringing off his prisoner. And even
when he honestly wishes to serve him, what can he do? He has no
exculpatory witnesses; he has had no time to expiscate facts; the
evidence for the prosecution is handed to him in court; and he can make
only such observations as occur at the moment, knowing all the while
that the prisoner's fate is already determined on. Sometimes the
prisoner, I was told, is not even produced in court, but remains in his
cell while his liberty and life are hanging in the balance. At day-break
his prison-door opens, and the jailor enters, holding in his hand a
little slip of paper. Ah! well does the prisoner know what that is. He
snatches it hastily from the jailor's hands, hurries with it to his
grated window, through which the day is breaking, holds it up with
trembling hands, and reads his doom. He is banished, it may be, or he
is sentenced to the galleys; or, more wretched still, he is doomed to
the scaffold. Unhappy man! 'twas but last eve that he laid him down in
the midst of his little ones, not dreaming of the black cloud that hung
above his dwelling; and now by next dawn he is in the Pope's dungeons,
parted from all he loves, most probably for ever, and within a few hours
of the galleys or the scaffold.

I saw these men taken out of Rome morning by morning,--that is, such of
them as were banished. They passed under the windows of my own apartment
in the Via Babuino. I have seen as many as twenty-four led away of a
morning. They were put by half-dozens into carts, to which they were
tied by twos, and chained together, as if they had been brigands. Thus
they moved on to the Flaminian gate, each cart escorted by a couple of
mounted gendarmes. The spectacle, alas! was too common to find
spectators; not a Roman followed it, or showed that he was conscious of
it, save by a mournful look at the melancholy cavalcade from his window,
knowing that what was their lot to-day might be his to-morrow. And what
the appearance and apparent profession of these m