There are, on an average, half a dozen fires in various parts of the town every night—­I mean houses on fire.  The sons of all the gentlemen here are volunteer engineers and firemen, and great is the delight they take in tearing up and down the streets, accompanied by red lights, speaking trumpets, and a rushing, roaring escort of running amateur extinguishers, who make night hideous with their bawling and bellowing.  This evening as I was observing that we had had no fire to-day, Dall said the weather was so hot, she thought they must have left off fires for the season.

Speaking of carriages and the devices on the panels of them here, which appear to be rather fancy pieces than heraldic bearings, my father said, “I wonder what they do for arms.”  “Use legs,” said Dall immediately, not at all bethinking herself how ancient a device on the shield of the Island of Man the three legs were, or knowing how much more ancient on the coins of Crotona, I think, or some other of the Magna Grecian colonies.

The hours which prevail here are those of our shop-keeping population; they rise and go to business very early, dine at three, which indeed is considered late, take tea at five, and supper at nine, which seems to us very primitive....  The women here are, generally speaking, very pretty little creatures, with a great deal of freshness and brilliancy; they dress in the extreme of the French fashion, and, I suppose from some unfavorable influence of the climate, they lose their beauty prematurely—­they become full-blown very early, and their bloom is extremely evanescent; they fade almost suddenly....  There seems to be a great deal of consumption here.  The climate is as capricious as ours, with this additional disadvantage, that the extremes of heat and cold are much more intense, and the transitions much more violent, the temperature varying occasionally as much as thirty degrees in the twenty-four hours.  I have just left off writing for five minutes to watch the lightning, which is dancing in a fiery ring all round the horizon—­summer lightning, no thunder, although the flashes are strong and vivid....

We have had such a tremendous storm—­really gorgeous, grand, and awful; lightning that stretched from side to side of the sky, making a blaze like daylight for several seconds at a time.  The mere reflection of it on the ground was more than the eye could endure; great forked ribbons of fire darting into the very bosom of the city and its crowded dwellings, or zigzagging through the air to an accompaniment of short, sharp, crackling thunder, succeeded by endless, deep, full-toned rolls that made the whole air shake and vibrate with the heavy concussion; pelting and pouring rain, a perfect tornado of wind.  Heaven and earth are all, while I write, one livid, violet-colored flame, and the thunder resounds through the wild frenzy of the elements like the voice of “the