ut they look
more like a flat-iron than any thing else.

"I paid a visit to Pompeii, and on coming back I saw some of the carts
of the country. They gave one a deplorable idea of the state of the
useful arts in this place. Scientific farming is out of the question.
If fine plantations are seen it's Nature does it.

"Vineyards abound everywhere. Wine is a great staple of the country.
Yet they don't export much after all. In fact the foreign commerce
is comparatively trifling. Chestnuts and olives are raised in
immense quantities. The chestnut is as essential to the Italian as
the potato is to the Irishman. A failure in the crop is attended
with the same disastrous consequences. They dry the nuts, grind them
into a kind of flour, and make them into cakes. I tasted one and
found it abominable. Yet these people eat it with garlic, and grow
fat on it. Chestnut bread, oil instead of butter, wine instead of
tea, and you have an Italian meal.

"It's a fine country for fruit. I found Gaeta surrounded by orange
groves. The fig is an important article in the economy of an Italian
household.

"I have been in Rome three weeks. Many people take much interest in
this place, though quite unnecessarily. I do not think it is at all
equal to Boston. Yet I have taken great pains to examine the place.
The streets are narrow and crooked, like those of Boston. They are
extremely dirty. There are no sidewalks. The gutter is in the middle
of the street. The people empty their slops from their windows. The
pavements are bad and very slippery. The accumulation of filth about
the streets is immense. The drainage is not good. They actually use
one old drain which, they tell me, was made three thousand years ago.

"Gas has only been recently introduced. I understand that a year or
two ago the streets were lighted by miserable contrivances, consisting
of a mean oil lamp swung from the middle of a rope stretched across
the street.

"The shops are not worth mentioning. There are no magnificent
_Dry-goods Stores_, such as I have seen by the hundred in Boston;
no _Hardware Stores_; no palatial _Patent Medicine Edifices_; no
signs of enterprise, in fact, at all.

"The houses are very uncomfortable. They are large, and built in the
form of a square. People live on separate flats. If it is cold they
have to grin and bear it. There are no stoves. I have suffered more
from the cold on some evenings since I have been here than ever I
did in-doors at