scene we descended to the ruins, and having taken at a farmhouse a person who acted as guide or cicerone, we began to examine those wonderful remains which have outlived even the name of the people by whom they were raised, and which continue almost perfect whilst a Roman and a Saracen city since raised have been destroyed. We had been walking for half an hour round the temples in the sunshine when our guide represented to us the danger that there was of suffering from the effects of malaria, for which, as is well known, this place is notorious, and advised us to retire into the interior of the temple of Neptune. We followed his advice, and my companions began to employ themselves in measuring the circumference of one of the Doric columns, when they suddenly called my attention to a stranger who was sitting on a camp-stool behind it. The appearance of any person in this place at this time was sufficiently remarkable, but the man who was before us from his dress and appearance would have been remarkable anywhere. He was employed in writing in a memorandum book when we first saw him, but he immediately rose and saluted us by bending the head slightly though gracefully; and this enabled me to see distinctly his person and dress. He was rather above the middle stature, slender, but with well-turned limbs; his countenance was remarkably intelligent, his eye hazel but full and strong, his front was smooth and unwrinkled, and but for some grey hairs, which appeared silvering his brown and curly locks, he might have been supposed to have hardly reached the middle age; his nose was aquiline, the expression of the lower part of his countenance remarkably sweet, and when he spoke to our guide, which he did with uncommon fluency in the Neapolitan dialect, I thought I had never heard a more agreeable voice, sonorous yet gentle and silver-sounded. His dress was very peculiar, almost like that of an ecclesiastic, but coarse and light; and there was a large soiled white hat on the ground beside him, on which was fastened a pilgrim's cockle shell, and there was suspended round his neck a long antique blue enamelled phial, like those found in the Greek tombs, and it was attached to a rosary of coarse beads. He took up his hat, and appeared to be retiring to another part of the building, when I apologised for the interruption we had given to his studies, begged him to resume them, and assured him that our stay in the building would be only momentary, for I saw that there was a cloud over the sun, the brightness of which was the cause of our retiring. I spoke in Italian; he replied in English, observing that he supposed the fear of contracting the malaria fever had induced us to seek the shelter of the shade: but it is too early in the season to have much reasonable fear of this insidious enemy; yet, he added, this bottle which you may have observed here at my breast, I carry about with me, as a supposed preventive of the effects of malaria, and as