ackeys. We were several days upon the journey,
travelling through a very wild country, which the ladies pretended to be
delighted with, and which the governor cursed on account of the badness
of the roads; and when we came to any particularly wild spot we used to
stop, in order to enjoy the scenery, as the ladies said; and then we
would spread a horse-cloth on the ground, and eat bread and cheese, and
drink wine of the country; and some of the holes and corners in which we
bivouacked, as the ladies called it, were something like this place where
we are now, so that when I came down here it put me in mind of them. At
last we arrived at the place where was the holy image.

"We went to the house or chapel in which the holy image was kept, a
frightful, ugly black figure of Holy Mary, dressed in her usual way; and
after we had stared at the figure, and some of our party had bowed down
to it, we were shown a great many things which were called holy relics,
which consisted of thumbnails and fore-nails and toe-nails, and hair and
teeth, and a feather or two, a mighty thigh-bone, but whether of a man or
a camel, I can't say; all of which things I was told, if properly touched
and handled, had mighty power to cure all kinds of disorders; and as we
went from the holy house, we saw a man in a state of great excitement; he
was foaming at the mouth, and cursing the holy image and all its
household, because, after he had worshipped it and made offerings to it,
and besought it to assist him in a game of chance which he was about to
play, it had left him in the lurch, allowing him to lose all his money;
and when I thought of all the rubbish I had seen, and the purposes which
it was applied to, in conjunction with the rage of the losing gamester at
the deaf and dumb image, I could not help comparing the whole with what
my poor brother used to tell me of the superstitious practices of the
blacks on the high Barbary shore, and their occasional rage and fury at
the things they worshipped; and I said to myself, if all this here
doesn't smell of fetish may I smell fetid.

"At this place the priest left us, returning to Naples with his
subordinate, on some particular business, I suppose. It was, however,
agreed that he should visit us at the Holy City. We did not go direct to
the Holy City, but bent our course to two or three other cities which the
family were desirous of seeing, but as nothing occurred to us in these
places of any particu