mercante di campagna, who is busily engaged in receiving and seating his numerous friends.  Large droves of young horses, and still larger herds of bullocks and buffaloes, are assembled in a neighboring yard.  Before taking our places on the range of seats we go to have a look at this portion of the dramatis personae in the coming spectacle—­from the outside, be it understood, of a high railed palisade, or stazzionata, as this description of enclosure is called in the language of the Roman Campagna.  The appearance of the animals inside, of the buffaloes especially, does not tempt one to make any nearer acquaintance with them.  The wild cattle of the Western prairies can hardly look wilder or more savage.  Whether the buffaloes are in reality more savage in their temper than the other horned cattle, or not, seems to be a doubtful question.  Some of the herdsmen say they are so:  others deny it.  Possibly the former may have the more sensitive imaginations, for unquestionably the buffalo is a far more terrible-looking fellow than his congener.  His dark color and the form of the vicious-looking, crumply horn in great part contribute to this.  But it seems to me that the expression of the eye produces the same effect to a yet greater degree.  The buffalo’s eye is smaller than that of the ordinary bull or cow, and often gleams out of the shaggy thicket of black hair around it with a red glare that has something truly diabolical in it.  There may perhaps be collected in the yard and in one or two enclosures near it some forty or fifty young horses, and perhaps altogether from a hundred to a hundred and fifty head of horned cattle.  Lounging about around these enclosures, or looking on while the last completing touches are given to the strong and high railing which surrounds the space in front of the range of seats, are several butteri and their aids, awaiting the master’s signal for the beginning of the day’s work.

Altogether, the scene is a very strange one.  The contact of the rural and the city life, the elements of which meet in these countries so rarely and mix so little and so unwillingly, seems strange and incongruous.  Nothing can be wilder than all the local surroundings of the scene; nothing less town-like than the living things, human and other, which are to enact their parts in it; nothing less rural, nothing more completely of the town townish, than the assembled company of spectators.  Evidently, the individuals belonging to either category look upon those of the other very little in the light of fellow-creatures.  In no country in the world is the division between the town population and that of the country so wide as it is in Italy.  No one of either class seems to be struck by, or even to see, the extreme beauty of the prospect from the spot on which we are standing.  It is a spot in the Campagna somewhat to the south-west of a line drawn from the city to the base of the Alban Hills; and though the place chosen for the operation