r three carriages of Turks, in one of
which I saw a woman of Tunis, with a curious gilded head-dress, eighteen
inches in height.

I saw one night a Turkish funeral. It passed me in one of the outer
streets, on its way to the Turkish burying ground. Those following the
coffin, which was covered with a heavy black pall, wore white turbans
and long white robes--the mourning color of the Turks. Torches were
borne by attendants, and the whole company passed on at a quick pace.
Seen thus by night, it had a strange and spectral appearance.

There is another spectacle here which was exceedingly revolting to me.
The condemned criminals, chained two and two, are kept at work through
the city, cleaning the streets. They are dressed in coarse garments of a
dirty red color, with the name of the crime for which they were
convicted, painted on the back. I shuddered to see so many marked with
the words--"_omicidio premeditato_." All day they are thus engaged,
exposed to the scorn and contumely of the crowd, and at night dragged
away to be incarcerated in damp, unwholesome dungeons, excavated under
the public thoroughfares.

The employment of criminals in this way is common in Italy. Two days
after crossing St. Gothard, we saw a company of abject-looking
creatures, eating their dinner by the road-side, near Bellinzona. One of
them had a small basket of articles of cotton and linen, and as he rose
up to offer them to us, I was startled by the clank of fetters. They
were all employed to labor on the road.

On going down to the wharf in Leghorn, in the morning, two or three days
ago, I found F---- and B---- just stepping on shore from the steamboat,
tired enough of the discomforts of the voyage, yet anxious to set out
for Florence as soon as possible. After we had shaken off the crowd of
porters, pedlars and vetturini, and taken a hasty breakfast at the _Cafe
Americano_, we went to the Police Office to get our passports, and had
the satisfaction of paying two francs for permission to proceed to
Florence. The weather had changed since the preceding day, and the
sirocco-wind which blows over from the coast of Africa, filled the
streets with clouds of dust, which made walking very unpleasant. The
clear blue sky had vanished, and a leaden cloud hung low on the
Mediterranean, hiding the shores of Corsica and the rooky isles of
Gorgona and Capraja.

The country between Leghorn and Pisa, is a flat marsh, intersected in
several places by can