priest said it was highly necessary for them to see before visiting the
Eternal City: so we left Naples in hired carriages, driven by fellows
they call veturini, cheating, drunken dogs, I remember they were. Besides
our own family there was the priest and his subordinate, and a couple of
hired lackeys. We were several days upon the journey, travelling through
a very wild country, which the ladies pretended to be delighted with, and
which the governor cursed on account of the badness of the roads; and
when we came to any particularly wild spot we used to stop, in order to
enjoy the scenery, as the ladies said; and then we would spread a horse-
cloth on the ground, and eat bread and cheese, and drink wine of the
country. And some of the holes and corners in which we bivouacked, as
the ladies called it, were something like this place where we are now, so
that when I came down here it put me in mind of them. At last we arrived
at the place where was the holy image.

'We went to the house or chapel in which the holy image was kept--a
frightful, ugly black figure of Holy Mary, dressed in her usual way; and
after we had stared at the figure, and some of our party had bowed down
to it, we were shown a great many things which were called holy relics,
which consisted of thumb-nails, and fore-nails, and toe-nails, and hair,
and teeth, and a feather or two, and a mighty thigh-bone, but whether of
a man or a camel I can't say; all of which things, I was told, if
properly touched and handled, had mighty power to cure all kinds of
disorders. And as we went from the holy house we saw a man in a state of
great excitement: he was foaming at the mouth, and cursing the holy image
and all its household, because, after he had worshipped it and made
offerings to it, and besought it to assist him in a game of chance which
he was about to play, it had left him in the lurch, allowing him to lose
all his money. And when I thought of all the rubbish I had seen, and the
purposes which it was applied to, in conjunction with the rage of the
losing gamester at the deaf and dumb image, I could not help comparing
the whole with what my poor brother used to tell me of the superstitious
practices of the blacks on the high Barbary shore, and their occasional
rage and fury at the things they worshipped; and I said to myself, If all
this here doesn't smell of fetish, may I smell fetid.

'At this place the priest left us, returning to Naples with his