of anything of the sort.  It is true that many visit the cemetery on the evening in question who have not recently lost any relative or friend, going thither merely as performing an act of devotion or of amusement, or, as is usually the case with all devotion in this country, of both combined.  But the greater number of the pilgrims is composed of those who have buried their dead within the preceding year.  Yet, as I have said, there was observable in the bearing of the crowd not only no reverential feeling, but not even that amount of quietude which the most careless body of people of our race would have deemed it but decent to assume on such an occasion.  Laughter might have been heard, though not perhaps very much.  But the noise was astonishing—­noise of incessant chatter in tones which bespoke anything but the tone of mind which might have been expected.  The truth is, that he who expects to find in the people of this race the sentiment of awe or reverence under any circumstances whatever does not know them.  It is not in them.  The capacity for it is not in them.  It is not a question of more or less education, or of this or that condition of life.  The higher and the lower classes, the clergy and the laity, are equally destitute of the capacity for feeling or comprehending the sentiment which makes so large a part of the lives of the people of a different race.  To me the observation, far from being suggested by what met my eye on the occasion in question, is the outcome of more than a quarter of a century’s experience of Italian ways and thoughts.  But the exhibition of the peculiarity on that occasion was very striking.  Doubtless there was many a mother among that throng whose heart had been wrung, whose very soul had been struck chill within her, by the loss of the child on whose grave she was about to place the humble tribute of common flowers which she carried in her hand.  No doubt many a truly-sorrowing husband and yet more deeply-stricken wife were on the way to visit the sod beneath which their hopes of happiness had been buried with their lost ones.  But whatever might have been in their hearts was not manifested by any token of reverential feeling.  There were tears, there were even sobs occasionally to be heard, but there was neither reverence nor what we should deem decency of behavior.

Within the cemetery “distance lent enchantment to the view.”  As seen from the cloister which surrounds the great square, as has been mentioned, the outlook over the “poor quarter” of the vast burial-ground was very striking.  Amid the wilderness of black crosses, which extends farther than eye could see, numerous figures were flitting hither and thither, many of them with lights in their hands.  In the farther distance, where the figures were invisible, the lights could still be seen mysteriously, as it seemed, moving over the closely-ranged graves like corpse-candles, as the old superstition termed the phosphoric lights which may in certain states