is a very peculiar appearance at many nasty places _out_ of
Sicily, and we really do not know its _pathology_. You tread
loathingly an indescribable earthen floor, and your eye, on entering
the apartment, is arrested by a nameless production of the fictile
art, certainly not of _Etruscan_ form, which is invariably placed on
the _bolster_ of the truck-bed destined presently for your devoted
head. Oh! to do justice to a Sicilian _locanda_ is plainly out of
question, and the rest of our task may as well be sung as said, verse
and prose being alike incapable of the hopeless reality:--

"Lodged for the night, O Muse! begin
To sing the true Sicilian inn,
Where the sad choice of six foul cells
The least exacting traveller quells
(Though crawling things, not yet in sight,
Are waiting for the shadowy night,
To issue forth when all is quiet,
And on your feverish pulses riot;)
Where one wood shutter scrapes the ground,
By crusts, stale-bones, and garbage bound;
Where unmolested spiders toil
Behind the mirror's mildew'd foil;
Where the cheap crucifix of lead
Hangs o'er the iron tressel'd bed;
Where the huge bolt will scarcely keep
Its promise to confiding sleep,
Till you have forced it to its goal
In the bored brick-work's crumbling hole;
Where, in loose flakes, the white-wash peeling
From the bare joints of rotten ceiling,
Give token sure of vermin's bower,
And swarms of bugs that bide their hour!
Though bands of fierce musquittos boom
Their threatening bugles round the room,
To bed! Ere wingless creatures crawl
Across your path from yonder wall,
And slipper'd feet unheeding tread
We know not what! To bed! to bed!
What can those horrid sounds portend?
Some waylaid traveller near his end,
From ghastly gash in mortal strife,
Or blow of bandit's blood-stained knife?
No! no! They're bawling to the _Virgin_,
Like victim under hands of surgeon!
From lamp-lit _daub_, proceeds the cry
Of that unearthly litany!
And now a train of mules goes by!

"One wretch comes whooping up the street
For whooping's sake! And now they beat
Drum after drum for market mass,
Each day's transactions on the _place!_
All things that go, or stay, or come,
They herald forth by tuck of drum.
Day dawns! a tinkling tuneless bell,
Whate'er it be, has news to tell.
Then twenty more begin to strike
In noisy discord, all alike;--
Convents and churche