curly, fair hair hanging down his back. Thus
his cheerful, lively conversation agreed but little with his grave
countenance. His dress was that of a fisherman, but as he is, in
general, considered a remarkable person--whatever may be thought of the
part he performed--so he understood, in spite of the meanness of his
attire, by his arrangement and his choice of colors, to give it a
peculiarity that stamped it in the memory of his contemporaries. The
life of this remarkable man--a nine-days' history--clearly shows us that
he possessed wonderful presence of mind and a spirit that knew not fear.

It happened, once, in the midst of the discontent which was everywhere
excited by the exorbitant increase of taxation, that Masaniello's wife
was detained by the keepers of the gate while she was endeavoring to
creep into the town with a bundle of flour done up in cloths to look
like a child in swaddling-clothes. She was imprisoned, and her husband,
who loved her much, only succeeded in obtaining her liberation after
eight days. Almost the whole of his miserable goods went to pay the fine
which had been imposed upon her. Thus hatred was smouldering in the mind
of Masaniello, and the flame was stirred when he--it is not known
how--quarrelled with the Duke of Maddaloni's people and was ill used by
them in an unusual manner. Then the idea seems to have occurred to him
to avenge himself by the aid of the people.

Many have related that instigators were not wanting. Giulio Genuino is
named, formerly the favorite of the Duke of Ossuna, who, after he had
encountered the strangest fate, and after wearing the chain of a galley
slave at Oran on the coast of Barbary, had returned an aged man, in the
habit of an ecclesiastic to his native country, meditating upon new
intrigues as the old ones had failed; also a captain of banditti and a
lay brother of the Carmine, who gave Masaniello money, were among the
conspirators. Perhaps all this was only an attempt to explain the
extraordinary fact. This much only is known with certainty, that
Masaniello sought to collect a troop of boys and young people, who,
among the numerous vagrant population, thronged the market and its
neighborhood from the adjacent districts, as whose leader he intended
to appear, as had often been done before, at the feast of the Madonna of
Carmel, which takes place in the middle of July.

At that festival it was the custom to build a castle of wood and canvas
in the middle