matter,--but of the dwellings of all classes of people who could afford
to live independently, that is, who were not serfs and retainers of the
rich. We talk of fire-proof buildings nowadays, which are mere shells of
iron and brick and stone that shrivel up like writing-paper in a great
fire. The only really fire-proof buildings were those of the Middle Age,
which consisted of nothing but stone and mortar throughout, stone walls,
stone vaults, stone floors, and often stone tables and stone seats. I
once visited the ancient castle of Muro, in the Basilicata, one of the
southern provinces in Italy, where Queen Joanna the First paid her life
for her sins at last, and died under the feather pillow that was forced
down upon her face by two Hungarian soldiers. It is as wild and lonely a
place as you will meet with in Europe, and yet the great castle has
never been a ruin, nor at any time uninhabited, since it was built in
the eleventh century, over eight hundred years ago. Nor has the lower
part of it ever needed repair. The walls are in places twenty-five feet
thick, of solid stone and mortar, so that the embrasure by which each
narrow window is reached is like a tunnel cut through rock, while the
deep prisons below are hewn out of the rock itself. Up to what we should
call the third story, every room is vaulted. Above that the floors are
laid on beams, and the walls are not more than eight feet
thick--comparatively flimsy for such a place! Nine-tenths of it was
built for strength--the small remainder for comfort; there is not a
single large hall in all the great fortress, and the courtyard within
the main gate is a gloomy, ill-shaped little paved space, barely big
enough to give fifty men standing room. Nothing can give any idea of the
crookedness of it all, of the small dark corridors, the narrow winding
steps, the dusky inclined ascents, paved with broad flagstones that
echo the lightest tread, and that must have rung and roared like sea
caves to the tramp of armed men. And so it was in the cities, too. In
Rome, bits of the old strongholds survive still. There were more of them
thirty years ago. Even the more modern palaces of the late Renascence
are built in such a way that they must have afforded a safe refuge
against everything except artillery. The strong iron-studded doors and
the heavily grated windows of the ground floor would stand a siege from
the street. The Palazzo Gabrielli, for two or three centuries the chief