[Illustration: Sketches By A Friend.]
"The horses, on the contrary, are poor affairs. I have yet to see the first decent horse. The animals employed by travellers generally are the lowest of their species. The shoes which the horses wear are of a singular shape. I can't describe them in writing, but they look more like a flat-iron than any thing else.
"I paid a visit to Pompeii, and on coming back I saw some of the carts of the country. They gave one a deplorable idea of the state of the useful arts in this place. Scientific farming is out of the question. If fine plantations are seen it's Nature does it.
"Vineyards abound everywhere. Wine is a great staple of the country. Yet they don't export much after all. In fact the foreign commerce is comparatively trifling. Chestnuts and olives are raised in immense quantities. The chestnut is as essential to the Italian as the potato is to the Irishman. A failure in the crop is attended with the same disastrous consequences. They dry the nuts, grind them into a kind of flour, and make them into cakes. I tasted one and found it abominable. Yet these people eat it with garlic, and grow fat on it. Chestnut bread, oil instead of butter, wine instead of tea, and you have an Italian meal.
"It's a fine country for fruit. I found Gaeta surrounded by orange groves. The fig is an important article in the economy of an Italian household.
"I have been in Rome three weeks. Many people take much interest in this place, though quite unnecessarily. I do not think it is at all equal to Boston. Yet I have taken great pains to examine the place. The streets are narrow and crooked, like those of Boston. They are extremely dirty. There are no sidewalks. The gutter is in the middle of the street. The people empty their slops from their windows. The pavements are bad and very slippery. The accumulation of filth about the streets is immense. The drainage is not good. They actually use one old drain which, they tell me, was made three thousand years ago.
"Gas has only been recently introduced. I understand that a year or two ago the streets were lighted by miserable contrivances, consisting of a mean oil lamp swung from the middle of a rope stretched across the street.
"The shops are not worth mentioning. There are no magnificent _Dry-goods Stores_, such as I have seen by the hundred in Boston; no _Hardware Stores_; no palatial _Patent Medicine Edifices_; no signs of enterprise, in fact, at all.
"The houses are very uncomfortable. They are large, and built in the form of a square. People live on separate flats. If it is cold they have to grin and bear it. There are no stoves. I have suffered more from the cold on some evenings since I have been here than ever I did in-doors at home. I have asked for a fire, but all they could give me was a poisonous fire of charcoal in an earthen thing like a basket.