ly the buffalo is a far more
terrible-looking fellow than his congener. His dark color and the form
of the vicious-looking, crumply horn in great part contribute to this.
But it seems to me that the expression of the eye produces the same
effect to a yet greater degree. The buffalo's eye is smaller than that
of the ordinary bull or cow, and often gleams out of the shaggy
thicket of black hair around it with a red glare that has something
truly diabolical in it. There may perhaps be collected in the yard and
in one or two enclosures near it some forty or fifty young horses, and
perhaps altogether from a hundred to a hundred and fifty head of
horned cattle. Lounging about around these enclosures, or looking on
while the last completing touches are given to the strong and high
railing which surrounds the space in front of the range of seats, are
several butteri and their aids, awaiting the master's signal for the
beginning of the day's work.

Altogether, the scene is a very strange one. The contact of the rural
and the city life, the elements of which meet in these countries so
rarely and mix so little and so unwillingly, seems strange and
incongruous. Nothing can be wilder than all the local surroundings of
the scene; nothing less town-like than the living things, human and
other, which are to enact their parts in it; nothing less rural,
nothing more completely of the town townish, than the assembled
company of spectators. Evidently, the individuals belonging to either
category look upon those of the other very little in the light of
fellow-creatures. In no country in the world is the division between
the town population and that of the country so wide as it is in Italy.
No one of either class seems to be struck by, or even to see, the
extreme beauty of the prospect from the spot on which we are standing.
It is a spot in the Campagna somewhat to the south-west of a line
drawn from the city to the base of the Alban Hills; and though the
place chosen for the operation of the merca is, as I have said, a
hollow, the generality of the immediate neighborhood is somewhat
higher than the level of the surrounding plain, and the eye is thus
enabled to wander far and wide over the Campagna--to the Alban Hills
southward; to the peak of Monte Cavo, where the early rays of the sun
are just touching with light the old gray walls of the convent on its
summit; to the large village of Rocca di Papa on its hillside a little
farther to the