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like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up close) fly open on
Red-letter days, and disclose an image and some flowers inside.

Just without the city gate, on the Albara road, is a small house,
with an altar in it, and a stationary money-box: also for the
benefit of the souls in Purgatory. Still further to stimulate the
charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either
side of the grated door, representing a select party of souls,
frying. One of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of
grey hair: as if he had been taken out of a hairdresser's window
and cast into the furnace. There he is: a most grotesque and
hideously comic old soul: for ever blistering in the real sun, and
melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and improvement
(and the contributions) of the poor Genoese.

They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on
their holidays: the staple places of entertainment among the
women, being the churches and the public walks. They are very
good-tempered, obliging, and industrious. Industry has not made
them clean, for their habitations are extremely filthy, and their
usual occupation on a fine Sunday morning, is to sit at their
doors, hunting in each other's heads. But their dwellings are so
close and confined that if those parts of the city had been beaten
down by Massena in the time of the terrible Blockade, it would have
at least occasioned one public benefit among many misfortunes.

The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly
washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and
ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this
dirt, who wears them when they are clean. The custom is to lay the
wet linen which is being operated upon, on a smooth stone, and
hammer away at it, with a flat wooden mallet. This they do, as
furiously as if they were revenging themselves on dress in general
for being connected with the Fall of Mankind.

It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at these
times, or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby, tightly
swathed up, arms and legs and all, in an enormous quantity of
wrapper, so that it is unable to move a toe or finger. This custom
(which we often see represented in old pictures) is universal among
the common people. A child is left anywhere without the
possibility of crawling away, or is accidentally knocked off a
shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is hung up to a hook now and then,
and left dangling like a doll at an English rag-shop, without the
least inconvenience to anybody.

I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the little
country church of San Martino, a couple of miles from the city,
while a baptism took place. I saw the priest, and an attendant
with a large taper, and a man, and a woman, and some others; but I
had no more idea, until the ceremony was all over, that it was a
baptism, or that the curious little stiff instrument, that was

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