From the open doors of other booths and hovels I heard nasal droning songs, the uncouth sounds of rude instruments, and the shrill tones of wrangling women of no good repute. Here, also, were a crowd of Maltese and Ionians, who bring our name into discredit wherever they are known. Lounging groups of superstitious mariners of the Adriatic added their lazy figures to the heterogeneous mass--a wild company; amongst whom it is never prudent to venture; for their knives gleam on small pretence; and their victims are never heard of more. Human life is held of a strange cheapness by these miscreants, and the law is powerless. Towards sundown, I returned to the ship; and, after dinner, as the evening closed quite in, a wandering Italian boy came on board. He was one of those itinerant musicians who roam over every country in the world; gathering up a little hoard with many a stern, unchronicled act of self-denial, and passing bitter days enough, poor lads, Heaven help them! This specimen had a hurdygurdy, an ivory whistle, and a rich impudent voice, with which he trolled forth a number of those ballads popular in the Austrian and Neapolitan sea-ports. They were mostly in the form of a dialogue between a young sailor sweetheart, a girl, and her mother, on the old subject of love and ruse, of which the salt is savoured among the people of every land, and the fresh, lively charm is felt from pole to pole. At the end of each verse the singer always lingered on the last note with an arch relish; and, carrying it on through his whistle, trilled out a sparkling impromptu chorus, which had a world of droll life and inuendo in it. Some of the airs he whistled had a dashing, seafaring pathos, quite captivating; and we fairly lay back and had a laugh at his roguish jests, as pleasant and refreshing as is awakened by the airy couplets of a French vaudeville. Yet those ballads seemed to speak aside to me, with a touching and eloquent plea for a race whose children have been taught to solace their captivity with songs, till they have mercifully learned a wondrous cunning in them; and who (knowing that their hopes are a coin with which they can buy but shadows) have courted oblivion so long, that they have found all beauty, freedom, heart-food, their brightest, quickest life, within a dream.