me so that I could not proceed, one of them in his
greediness almost tore my satchel out of my hands, I responded to his
supplication with such a tremendous no, that the next fellow assumed a
stooping posture and asked me in a whisper! These people deserve our pity
rather than censure. Many of them are evidently sometimes in a famishing
condition. But few who have not seen, can form an idea of the poverty
which reigns in some sections of Southern Italy, especially between Naples
and Brindisi. I saw children running about in this section, that had
little of clothing save a shirt, which was generally torn in every part;
some few, below the age of about six or eight years, had not even a thread
of clothing upon their bodies. An elderly man that was plowing with a pair
of oxen, as is the custom in Italy, was accompanied by his wife who was
well dressed, but he wore only a shirt that reached to his knees, and a
hat. I spent a Sunday at Brindisi, and observed that people keep no Sunday
there. All the people wear old and tattered garments, and I could not see
a hat, a coat or a pair of pantaloons on the person of one of the hundreds
that thronged the market-place all Sunday, that looked as if it had been
new at any time within the last few years!

The railroad tunnels are even more numerous than in the Black Forest. In
some places it becomes impossible to read in the cars, as the train is
much of the time under the mountains. From the window of the cars I saw a
man with his bare feet in a tub treading grapes, for the purpose of making
wine. It reminded me of the way, as it is said, some made their sourcrout
in this country some forty-five or fifty years ago.

I spent a day among the ruins of Pompeii and in the ascent of Mount
Vesuvius. Pompeii was a town of about 30,000 inhabitants when it was
destroyed by an eruption of old Vesuvius in A.D. 79. On the 24th of August
a dense shower of ashes covered the town 3 feet in thickness, but allowed
the inhabitants time to escape. Only of those which returned to recover
valuables, &c., were overtaken and covered by the shower of red hot
rapilli, or fragments of pumice-stone, which, with succeeding showers of
ashes, covered the town to the depth of 7-8 feet. "The present
superincumbent mass is about 20 feet in thickness." In the one third of
the town already excavated the skeletons of some 500 have been found.
Casts of bodies found in 1863, were made by pouring plaster of Paris into
the