y, of course,
murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and
lure into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly ashore
from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there to attract my
maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into that place
of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed with
drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the
most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away
in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight,
emptied of every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion
of treachery, and wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the
protection of the Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands,
shall proceed to clean out, _more Americano_, the New York Coffee
House, when Antonino shall develop into one of the landlords, and
deal them the most artistic stab in Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino;
tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless!
II.
Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life,
it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of
maccaroni haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There
were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors
of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making
maccaroni; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it
in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and putting it
away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions
were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops,
that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops
were in the proportion of one to five of the former; and the artist
who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of
phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Venice, science
grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to
let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on
the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at
the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a
tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist
also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared,
the favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure
reclining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and
bleeding from the
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