and their
riders in pieces; and the best method for avoiding this fate, is to
clap spurs to your beast, and seek your safety in flight. I have been
more than once obliged to fly before them. They always give you
warning, by raising a hideous braying as soon as they perceive the
horse at a distance. The mules of Provence are not so mischievous,
because they are more used to the sight and society of horses: but
those of Piedmont are by far the largest and the strongest I have seen.

Some very feasible schemes for improving the commerce of Nice have been
presented to the ministry of Turin; but hitherto without success. The
English import annually between two and three thousand bales of raw
silk, the growth of Piedmont; and this declaration would be held legal
evidence. In some parts of France, the cure of the parish, on All
Souls' day, which is called le jour des morts, says a libera domine for
two sols, at every grave in the burying-ground, for the release of the
soul whose body is there interred.

The artisans of Nice are very lazy, very needy, very aukward, and void
of all ingenuity. The price of their labour is very near as high as at
London or Paris. Rather than work for moderate profit, arising from
constant employment, which would comfortably maintain them and their
families, they choose to starve at home, to lounge about the ramparts,
bask themselves in the sun, or play at bowls in the streets from
morning 'till night.

The lowest class of people consists of fishermen, day labourers,
porters, and peasants: these last are distributed chiefly in the small
cassines in the neighbourhood of the city, and are said to amount to
twelve thousand. They are employed in labouring the ground, and have
all the outward signs of extreme misery. They are all diminutive,
meagre, withered, dirty, and half naked; in their complexions, not
barely swarthy, but as black as Moors; and I believe many of them are
descendants of that people. They are very hard favoured; and their
women in general have the coarsest features I have ever seen: it must
be owned, however, they have the finest teeth in the world. The
nourishment of those poor creatures consists of the refuse of the
garden, very coarse bread, a kind of meal called polenta, made of
Indian corn, which is very nourishing and agreeable, and a little oil;
but even in these particulars, they seem to be stinted to very scanty
meals. I have known a peasant feed his family with the skins