the heat of summer; and every evening, when the battle was over, the dead were gathered in heaps, and burned, to prevent infection; and there are their remains to this day, manuring the vineyards around the walls. I wonder if the evening breezes, as they blow over the Janiculum, don't waft across the odour to the Vatican. Let us descend the hill, and re-enter the city. There is a class of buildings which you cannot fail to note, and which at first you take to be prisons. They are large, gloomy-looking houses, of from three to four stories, with massive doors, and windows closed with strong upright iron stanchions, crossed with horizontal bars, forming a network of iron of so close a texture, that scarce a pigeon could squeeze itself through. Ah, there, you say, the brigand or the Mazzinist groans! No; the place is a convent. It is the dwelling, not of crime, but of "heavenly meditation." The beings that live there are so perfectly happy, so glad to have escaped from the evil world outside, and so delighted with their paradise, that not one of them would leave it, though you should open these doors, and tear away these iron bars. So the priests say. Is it not strange, then, to confine with bolt and bar beings who intend anything but escape? and is it not, to say the least, a needless waste of iron, in a country where iron is so very scarce and so very dear? It would be worth while making the trial, if only for a summer's day, of opening these doors, and astonishing Rome with the great amount of happiness within it, of which, meanwhile, it has not the least idea. I have seen the dignitaries entering, but no glimpse could I obtain of the interior; for immediately behind the strong outer door is an inner one, and how many more I know not. Mr Seymour has told us of a nun, while he was in Rome, who found her way out through all these doors and bars; but, instead of fleeing back into her paradise, she rushed straight to the Tiber, and sought death beneath its floods.