ed almost entirely in classifying, in examining
signatures, in skirmishes of all kinds around this main body.

My colleagues and I are working in a room in the municipal Palazzo del
Marino, a vast deserted building used, I believe, as a storehouse. Our
leathern armchairs and the table on which the documents are arranged
occupy the middle of the room. Along the walls are several cupboards,
nests of registers and rats; a few pictures with their faces to the wall;
some carved wood scutcheons, half a dozen flagstaffs and a triumphal arch
in cardboard, now taken to pieces and rotting--gloomy apparatus of bygone
festivals.

The persons taking part in the examination besides the three Frenchmen,
are, in the first place, a little Italian judge, with a mean face,
wrinkled like a winter apple, whose eyelids always seem heavy with sleep;
secondly, a clerk, shining with fat, his dress, hair, and countenance
expressive of restrained jollity, as he dreams voluptuous dreams of the
cool drinks he means to absorb through a straw when the hour of
deliverance shall sound from the frightful cuckoo clock, a relic of the
French occupation, which ticks at the end of the room; thirdly, a
creature whose position is difficult to determine--I think he must be
employed in some registry; he is here as a mere manual laborer. This
third person gives me the idea of being very much interested in the
fortunes of Signore Porfirio Zampini, for on each occasion, when his
duties required him to bring us documents, he whispered in my ear:

"If you only knew, my lord, what a man Zampini is! what a noble heart,
what a paladin!"

Take notice that this "paladin" is a macaroni-seller, strongly suspected
of trying to hoodwink the French courts.

Amid the awful heat which penetrated the windows, the doors, even the
sun-baked walls, we had to listen to, read, and compare documents. Gnats
of a ferocious kind, hatched by thousands in the hangings of this
hothouse, flew around our perspiring heads. Their buzzing got the upper
hand at intervals when the clerk's voice grew weary and, diminishing in
volume, threatened to fade away into snores.

The little judge rapped on the table with his paperknife and urged the
reader afresh upon his wild career. My colleague from the Record Office
showed no sign of weariness. Motionless, attentive, classing the smallest
papers in his orderly mind, he did not even feel the' gnats swooping upon
the veins in his hands, stinging the