of our Capucins vaunting himself ready and
able to bleed for the _truth_. Liberal ideas are not common in the
cloister. "You aver," said he, "that Roman Catholics may be in a way of
salvation; we by no means return the compliment--but as both Lutherans
and Calvinists agree in believing thus charitably of _us_, and not of
one another, it seems a pretty strong argument in our favour." With such
high subjects did our apparently very much in earnest friends entertain
us, in a garden planted amidst those quarried prisons of the captive
Athenians. A man attempted to-day to put off some bad coins upon us,
which we recollected to have had offered to us by another hand--still we
only hinted that they were forgeries, and declined purchasing. While
this was in progress, another person came up properly introduced, with
an _enlarged spleen_, which was _certainly_ authentic. We tell him that
such indurations of viscera require a _very long time_ indeed for
removal: and that malaria is their origin This convent possesses one of
those revolting vaults, which dry up and preserve the corpse in the form
of mummy; a huge trap-door flapped its wooden wings, and gave us
admission into a large subterranean apartment, wherein we presently
stood in the midst of defunct brethren arranged along the walls, as if
they stood in chapel at their devotions! On the floor thirty or forty
light boxes looked like orange chests, with custom-house hieroglyphics
on their lids; but they were marked with proper and even high-sounding
names, and were in fact the coffins of barons, counts, and prelates,
transported here to have the _benefit of the air_, and there accordingly
they lay unburied, to profit by the antiseptic qualities of the soil. We
looked at a baron or two, and saw something like a huge caterpillar
beginning to change into a chrysalis; a grub mummy dressed out in old
Catanian silk, and so enveloped in cobwebs, that you could with
difficulty make out the central nucleus of shrivelled humanity.
"_Questo_," said our cowled conductor, "e il Barone Avellina, morto di
cholera, anno aetatis fifty-six; he loved our order! here is another
equally good-looking personage," said he, exposing a corrugated face and
dark hair, frightfully at variance with a blue silk handkerchief, and
all the funeral gear of twenty years ago. This was another victim to
that awful visitation; his feet and hands were covered with faded herbs,
rosemary, and lavender; first placed in