The inn of Terracina stands just outside of the walls of the old town of that name, on the frontiers of the Roman territory. A little, lazy, Italian town, the inhabitants of which, apparently heedless and listless, are said to be little better than the brigands which surround them, and indeed are half of them supposed to be in some way or other connected with the robbers. A vast, rocky height rises perpendicularly above it, with the ruins of the castle of Theodoric the Goth, crowning its summit; before it spreads the wide bosom of the Mediterranean, that sea without flux or reflux. There seems an idle pause in every thing about this place. The port is without a sail, excepting that once in a while a solitary felucca may be seen, disgorging its holy cargo of baccala, the meagre provision for the Quaresima or Lent. The naked watch towers, rising here and there along the coast, speak of pirates and corsairs which hover about these shores: while the low huts, as stations for soldiers, which dot the distant road, as it winds through an olive grove, intimate that in the ascent there is danger for the traveller and facility for the bandit. Indeed, it is between this town and Fondi that the road to Naples is Mostly infested by banditti. It winds among rocky and solitary places, where the robbers are enabled to see the traveller from a distance from the brows of hills or impending precipices, and to lie in wait for him, at the lonely and difficult passes. At the time that the estafette made this sudden appearance, almost in _cuerpo_, the audacity of the robbers had risen to an unparalleled height. They had their spies and emissaries in every town, village, and osteria, to give them notice of the quality and movements of travellers. They did not scruple to send messages into the country towns and villas, demanding certain sums of money, or articles of dress and luxury; with menaces of vengeance in case of refusal. They had plundered carriages; carried people of rank and fortune into the mountains and obliged them to write for heavy ransoms; and had committed outrages on females who had fallen in their power. The police exerted its rigor in vain. The brigands were too numerous And powerful for a weak police. They were countenanced and cherished by several of the villages; and though now and then the limbs of malefactors hung blackening in the trees near which they had committed some atrocity; or their heads stuck upon posts in iron cages made some dreary part of the road still more dreary, still they seemed to strike dismay into no bosom but that of the traveller.