When we got into Petigo, we found the lodging-houses considerably crowded.  I contrived, however, to establish myself as well as another, and in consequence of my black, dress and the garrulous industry of my epicene companion, who stuck close to me all along, was treated with more than common respect.  And here I was deeply impressed with the remarkable contour of many visages, which I had now a better opportunity of examining than while on the road.  There seemed every description of guilt, and every degree of religious feeling, mingled together in the same mass, and all more or less subdued by the same principle of abrupt and gloomy abstraction.

There was a little man dressed in a turned black coat, and drab cassimere small-clothes, who struck me as a remarkable figure; his back was long, his legs and thighs short and he walked on the edge of his feet.  He had a pale, sorrowful face, with bags hung under his eyes, drooping eyelids, no beard, no brows, and no chin; for in the place of the two latter, there was a slight frown where the brows ought to have been, and a curve in the place of the chin, merely perceptible from the bottom of his underlip to his throat.  He wore his own hair, which was a light bay, so that you could scarcely distinguish it from a wig.  I was given to understand that he was a religious tailor under three blessed orders.

There was another round-shouldered man, with black, twinkling eyes, plump face, rosy cheeks, and nose twisted at the top.  In his character, humor appeared to be the predominant principle.  He was evidently an original, and, I am sure, had the knack of turning the ludicrous side of every object towards him.  His eye would roll about from one person to another while fingering his beads, with an expression of humor something like delight beaming from his fixed, steady countenance; and when anything that would have been particularly worthy of a joke met his glance, I could perceive a tremulous twinkle of the eye intimating his inward enjoyment.  I think still this jocular abstinence was to him the severest part of the pilgrimage.  I asked him was he ever at the “Island” before; he peered into my face with a look that infected me with risibility, without knowing why, shrugged up his shoulders, looked into the fire, and said “No,” with a dry emphatic cough after it—­as much as to say, you may apply my answer to the future as well as to the past.  Religion, I thought, was giving him up, or sent him here as a last resource.  He spoke to nobody.

A little behind the humorist sat a very tall, thin, important-looking personage, dressed in a shabby black coat; there was a cast of severity and self-sufficiency in his face, which at once indicated him to be a man of office and authority, little accustomed to have his own will disputed.  I was not wrong in my conjecture; he was a classical schoolmaster, and was pompously occupied, when I first saw him, reading through his spectacles, with his head raised aloft, the seven Penitential Psalms in Latin, out of the Key of Paradise, to a circle of women and children, along with two or three men in frieze coats, who listened with profound attention.