old house-beam riddled and
traversed in all directions by miniature labyrinths of worm-holes,
crossing, intercommunicating, turning to right and left, upwards and
downwards, but hardly ever coming out to the surface. It has been
described by almost every writer who ever put words together about Rome,
but no words, no similes, no comparisons, can make those see it who were
never there. In a low-lying space enclosed within a circuit of five
hundred yards, and little, if at all, larger than the Palazzo Doria,
between four and five thousand human beings were permanently crowded
together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and
vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river and
always reeking with its undried slime; a little, pale-faced,
crooked-legged, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of
foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold
apart; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled,
toiled half doubled together upon the darning and piecing and smoothing
of old clothes, whose many little children huddled themselves into
corners, to teach one another to count; a people of sellers who sold
nothing that was not old or damaged, and who had nothing that they would
not sell; a people clothed in rags, living among rags, thriving on rags;
a people strangely proof against pestilence, gathering rags from the
city to their dens, when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's
gates, and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague
themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly,
labouring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, till Friday
night came at last, and the old crier's melancholy voice ran through the
darkening alleys--'The Sabbath has begun.'

And all at once the rags were gone, the ghostly old clothes that swung
like hanged men, by the neck, in the doorways of the cavernous shops,
flitted away into the utter darkness within; the old bits of iron and
brass went rattling out of sight, like spectres' chains; the hook-nosed
antiquary drew in his cracked old show-case; the greasy frier of fish
and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the
slipshod darning-women, half-blind with six days' work, folded the
half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old
rush-bottomed chairs indoors with them.

Then, on the morrow, in the rich synagogue with its tapestries, it