of the merchandise in question; partly, probably, from an habitual consciousness on the part of the dealers that the details of their traffic in all its particulars are not of a nature to be safely submitted to the public eye; partly from that secretiveness which is the natural result of living for many generations from father to son under the tyranny of an alien race, whose bitterly hostile prejudices were but little restrained by law or justice; and partly also, no doubt, from the genuine Roman laziness, which in its perfection is capable of overriding even Jewish keenness of trade,--the Jew brokers of the Ghetto are often unwilling to show their hidden stores to the first comer. Some amount of diplomacy and some show of the probability of effecting an advantageous deal must be had recourse to in order to attain the purpose of the explorer. On the recent occasion to which I have referred these difficulties had been overcome, and I had made my way into the interior of one of the dens I have described in the company of a lady friend who is a confirmed and irreclaimable lace-hunter, and who in pursuit of her game would have confronted worse obstacles than any that we had to encounter. For, in truth, the exterior appearance and the entrance-chambers are the worst part of the Ghetto dwellings. One is curiously reminded of the old mediæval stories of Jewish dwellings, where the utmost squalor and poverty of exterior was a mere blind for an interior gorgeous with every manifestation of wealth and luxury. I will not say that much of the latter is to be found in the dwellings of the Ghetto, but a degree of comfortable decency and indications of the possession of capital may be met with which the exterior appearances would not have led one to anticipate. Well, we had reached the third floor of one of these sinister-looking abodes, conducted by a fat old Jewess with a pair of huge black eyes, a large smooth face as yellow as a guinea, and a vast development of bust clad in dirty white wrappers of some sort. A door on the landing-place jealously locked with two huge keys admitted us into a suite of three good-sized rooms crammed from floor to ceiling with a collection of articles more heterogeneous than can easily be conceived--far more so than can be described.