The women when young are good–looking; many have the dark Italian eye, but, like the Mentone women, soon acquire, from the drudgery to which they are exposed, a hard–looking and dried–up appearance. They are treated as very beasts of burden, and are accustomed from early years to carry enormous loads upon their heads, far more so than at Mentone, and they glory in the amount they can carry. I have beheld one carrying an enormous log of wood on her head; and barrels, and every description of heavy articles, are constantly to be seen so carried. A lady told me she had a heavy oak table carried home to her house by her gardener’s wife, and it was thought nothing of. Such a thing as a rope and pulley, much less a crane to lift stones from the ground to the floors where masons are building a house, are utterly unknown. The women are employed as day–labourers, at something like a shilling a day, to carry the stones aloft on their heads. I have seen a woman, time after time, carrying a stone or a couple of uneven stones balanced, the one on the top of the other, on her head, up ladders nearly perpendicular, to a height of two storeys, to the stage where the masons were working. All they do is just to twist a handkerchief in a coil on the head, and then, with a most extraordinary power of balancing, they convey the load to where it is wanted. Men very seldom undertake the drudgery. If they do, they carry a lighter load, not, however, on their heads, but on the bent back or shoulders, protected by a sack. I have observed a woman carrying a stone on her head which it took four of them to lift. Their skulls and spines no doubt thicken and acquire some strange amount of hardy strength, but any nobler faculty must be crushed out of them; yet they never seem to feel their degradation, and would resent, I presume, the introduction of appliances by which their labour would be saved, and at the same time a means of livelihood taken from them.