dazzle the as yet unaccustomed vision of the natives. "We have likenesses of Victor Emanuel and of Garibaldi in every shop window, and multitudes crowd around them to admire; in short, there is at present a _furia_ for the _Re Galantuomo_ and the Hero of Sicily." The prisons of the police were thus described by the same writer: "I yesterday saw some of them. Several members of the commission appointed to close them—themselves once prisoners here—accompanied me. A grated door led down to an ante-chamber, which was lighted only through these bars. Stone walls, stone floor—stone everywhere, except the ground, which was covered over with burnt fragments of books, that had been taken in domiciliary visits and destroyed here. 'Here one breathes,' said a pardoned prisoner; 'but bring a light,' he said to a jailer, and we descended from this twilight room into another which received the reflection of the twilight through a hole in the door. It was small and of stone—nothing but stone—and on the right I observed a stone bed three feet high from the ground, with an elevation of stone called a pillow. A door is opened and leads into another room, where no twilight, no reflected twilight, nor a ray of light nor a breath of air can penetrate. 'I was imprisoned here,' said one of my conductors. I looked at him as if expecting to find that he was turned into a brute beast, for it was a den for a wild animal, not a chamber for a Christian man, in a country teeming with Christ's ministers, and where the holy Apostolic Catholic religion is the only one permitted to be professed. In some parts a man could not stand upright, so that there he lay in Stygian darkness, without any change of air, 'and on bare ground,' said my friend, 'unless he could afford to pay an extortionate price for a mattress, to a licensed spy and denouncer, who drove a good trade in human misery.' 'Let us leave this den,' I said, and so we groped back into the chamber where the reflection of twilight penetrated. 'Take care,' cried the jailer, as I stumbled over a mountain of old books and papers. On the opposite side was another _criminale_ about eleven by five palms, where five or six persons were at times confined. The smell of the prison was insufferable. Now mark, who were the men confined in these places not fit for beasts? Not condemned criminals; no! but men arrested on suspicion and waiting for an order for their committal—men of rank and education accustomed to the comforts of a home." The following passages from a letter written at Florence, are very appropriate in this place: