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will stare at you with much surprise, and perhaps say-How can you be so heartless as to wish to send away one of these poor "Povere!" I admit the cogency of his argument; I stand rebuked, and take my leave never to re-enter. A trattoria being out of the question, I look for a substitute, and luckily come upon one close round the corner. In the Piazza Tartarughi (or Tortoise-place-so called from the superb fountain with the four youths holding tortoises) has been erected, during the morning, a tent, or booth, one mass of floral decoration-flowers in festoons, and huge baskets full, within and without-in front is a small table, or counter, covered with an immaculately-clean damask cloth-placed in the middle are two bowls, one of flour and the other of batter-just outside the booth is a gigantic cauldron of boiling oil. So far the cooking materials are well enough. Then, as for the cook, a damsel, rather brown perhaps but with such eyes! And, dear me, how she can use them too! Rather fierce is the expression of her mouth and chin, perhaps, so you had better take care not to offend her; she is a native of the Trastevere, and, being descended from the old Roman stock, without any taint of Gothic blood in her veins, is to be treated in every respect with the attention due to her origin. Her head is costumed in a long white falling drapery edged with point-lace that a Countess might envy; her large sleeves are also of point-lace, but they are now tucked up, displaying arms that for form and whiteness put the painters and sculptors in desperation. The hands and arms of

Italian women excel all others, while their feet and ankles are singularly ill-formed and clumsy. Inserted in the front of her velvet bodice, in the place of what, I believe, English milliners call a busk, is a sharp curved knife, with the end of the handle just peeping out at her waist, in the form of a silver brooch. This knife can be, and is, used occasionally; so we had best be careful. At one end of the booth are baskets, in which are various kinds of fish just fresh from the market. The fish are exceedingly small, averaging in size between whitebait and sardines, and of strange kinds, the only one known in this country being the red mullet. The lady's occupation consists in taking the fish that the visitor has selected, wiping it, dipping it into the dish of batter, then into the dry flour, and finally into the cauldron of boiling oil. At its first entrance into the oil, the fish sinks to the bottom; but in a few moments its reappearance at the surface announces that the cooking process is completed. The lady from the Trastevere then takes it out with pincers, deposits it in the midst of a plate of lemon which she has previously chopped into pieces the size and shape of dice, and presents it for your refection with the air and bearing of a Juno. Whilst the above was proceeding, I had pulled out my sketch-book, for the purpose of making a slight reminiscence of the imperious beauty, a proceeding that was met at once by a firm and decided protest, and the information that Ladies of the Trastevere never, for any consideration, pose to the artists. I have, however, been able to make one or two studies from her that have escaped her notice.

On a fine day, in an Italian midsummer, something potable is a desirable adjunct to dinner. In the interior of the booth, behind the lady, may be seen a long, movable tube, communicating directly with the cool, plashing water of the fountain outside; on some shelves are piles of lemons and some heaps of white sugar. Lemonade is infinitely to be preferred to such Italian wines as you can buy in the streets, so you invest in it pretty deeply. Proud as the lady is, she does not disdain a settlement; if you wish to stand well with her, and to get a gracious bow from her another time, you will not ask her how much you shall pay her. If you do, you are likely to get a cross, disdainful answer. You had best put a silver coin of some size into her hand, and let her give you the change; she considers it due to her position to be allowed to take what she pleases, and it will not be much, something like,-four glasses of lemonade, twopence; six mullets, confectioned in oil, threepence; total, fivepence-but take care how you offer the lady the odd penny. You may easily arouse her wrath, while, on the contrary, you may be fortunate enough to contract with her an everlasting friendship; it is sometimes an even chance which it will be. After settling for the dinner, I showed her one of the portraits in my sketch-book. She looked at it for a moment, then tore it out and put it in her bosom, close under the knife, looking at me for a moment as if she suspected I meant to rescue it. I told her, however, that she was quite welcome to keep it; but this did not comport with her ideas-she must pay for it. I might have the paul I had paid for the dinner back again. That, however, would not do. She was quite welcome to it as a reminiscence of the "pittore Inglese," and I should keep the other for myself as a remembrance of the "Donna of the Trastevere." She considered a moment, and then informed me that the Trasteverians were not beggars; and taking a small bottle of Rosoglio from a private recess, she proceeded to mix it with lemon and syrup, and make a glass of Roman punch, apply her lips to it, drinking about a quarter, and with no small grandeur hand the glass to me. I must drink the rest, or I am her mortal foe. I drink, and we are friends for ever —(that is, a lady's "for ever"); we have by so doing entered into a compact-a bond of mutual protection. I do not say that I have acquired any right to aspire to the honour of the lady's hand—that would be going too far for a Trastevere damsel, but at all events, come what may, that knife will never be raised against me; and should I be in a difficulty with any of her neighbours or relatives, I may count on her protection, and if necessary, that knife will be wielded, and effectually too, in my defence. She keeps her portrait, and considers she has overpaid me a thousand per cent. by this act. I duly appreciate the honour, and after writing her name-Giacinte Solari-beneath the other sketch in my note-book, I respectfully lift my hat, and take my leave.

THOMAS HEAPHY.

THE LIMBO OF INFANTS.

"WHOм the gods love die young," said Solon, one of the seven wise men of Greece; and epitaphs without end might be quoted from country churchyards, which show that Christian parents still console themselves with the same reflection. Yet we will venture to say, that the idea never suggested itself spontaneously at a sick child's bedside it is an afterthought. The natural feeling that first arises is one of regret at the young life wasted, and the promise unfulfilled.

When Æneas, led by the Sybil, steps from Charon's leaky boat upon the Stygian strand, the land of departed spirits,-

"Before the gates, the cries of babes new-born,
Whom Fate had from their tender mothers torn,
Assault his ears: then those whom form of laws
Condemned to die when traitors judged their cause."

He arrives next at the Land of Suicides, and then at the "Plains of Mourning," where unhappy lovers dwell. The whole of that first region is occupied by those who have died untimely deaths-who had not lived out their proper span of life, and are still lingering reluctantly upon the shore of the great gulf which separates them for ever from light and life.

It is curious to turn to Dante, and compare the parallel passage. When the poet has been ferried over by Charon, he enters Limbo, the first circle that surrounds the abyss :

"Here, as my eye could note, no plaint was heard,

Except of sighs, that made the eternal air

Tremble: not caused by tortures, but from grief,
Felt by those multitudes, many and vast,

Of men, women, and infants."

These, as he is informed by his guide, are the souls of those who have died without sin, but without baptism.

Solon had probably attained a good old age, and, perhaps, had seen something of life at Corinth, before he learned to say, that an early death was a happy fate. Like the wise king Solomon, he had taken " Omnia vanitas" for his refrain, instead of the "Hymen O Hymena" of his earlier years. Even Horace is sometimes in the same mood; and Sir

Thomas Browne quotes the stoic Lucan thus :

"We're all deluded: vainly searching ways

To make us happy by the length of days;

For, cunningly, to make 's protract this breath,

The gods conceal the happiness of death."

Let the poets explain it as they will, our own feelings tell us that the death of a young child is simply an outrage upon nature. The first thing

for practical men to do, is to ascertain whether it is in our power to prevent such deaths, and with whom the present fault lies. And, urged on by the Registrar-General and Lord Shaftesbury, such inquiries into the statistics of the mortality of English children are producing astounding revelations.

Perhaps we have no right to express indignation, for we are no worse in our sanitary arrangements than were our forefathers; we are much better; and grow better daily, as we learn to know better. But the facts we are beginning to know are enough to startle the most apathetic. Fifty thousand persons die annually in London; and of these, no less than twentyone thousand are children under ten years of age-more than one death in three is that of a little child--more than one-third of the whole population of London perishes in infancy and childhood-twenty-four in a hundred die during the two first years of life; out of the remaining seventy-six eleven die during the next eight years-and it always has been so, ever since the days of Solon; so there can be nothing very wrong in it; and children's deaths attract little more notice than do sparrows falling to the ground.

Something, it is true, has been done, and something is doing. We are spending much money in draining our Metropolis; we have several times solemnly resolved to live cleanly; and Sanitary Science has been invented and a good deal talked about. "Those whom their parents love live to maturity" is to be the future reading of Solon's proverb, growing truer, we hope, every day, as civilization and the arts of health improve; but it is still very far from true, as the sad experience of parents tells us.

We read in books of Natural History of the wealth and the waste of the reproductive powers of nature-of plants that produce ten thousand seeds, only two or three of which grow and bear seed again; of the thousand young of the herring, of which perhaps only one survives, and produces its thousand, to preserve the balance of creation; and really, when we read the sum of children who die young, and add to them the multitude of those who perish ere they cross the threshold of life, of whom there is no account taken, it would almost seem as if the same laws applied to the human race. Yet, why should this be so in the case of man? The gull and the albatross, the porpoise and the dolphin, are all maintained upon the surplus of the herring-shoals; but man is the crown of created beings: the death of a man is a waste of life on which no other life is supported. His flesh was not intended to multiply to feed the fowls of the air or the beasts of the field, but in order to fulfil his mission of replenishing the earth and subduing it. The English race has done its share of colonizing, but man has not yet replenished half the globe. We are told by Lord Shaftesbury that (without any mention being made of war) there are one hundred thousand preventable deaths in England every year; and this, while there is a Far West in Canada, and Australia in the Far East, and all the Ocean sown with fertile half-tenanted Hesperides.

The same law prevails among plants, animals, and men-where there is a struggle for the means of life, there the most feeble perish. Among men, the most feeble are the poor; and the weakest of the poor are of course the children. The weakest go to the wall; you may often see them at night, crouching in corners and sleeping on door-steps-gone to the wall!

There are good Samaritans enough passing by, on both sides of every street. There is an infinite amount of benevolence in the world, if it could only be funded and drawn on-a benevolence which might be coined into health, and issued in the shape of little children saved from death. Every infant born in the back lanes of London is a cheque bearing the words, "Pay to my order so much food and so much pure air;" and those which Nature dishonours must be paid by the Bank of Benevolence. The good Samaritans pass by, because what is everybody's business is nobody's business;--the men have so much to do in providing fortunes for their own children; and it is very awkward for ladies to go about by themselves, and frequent the back streets.

Can nothing be done then?-has nothing been done, to stay this terrible, this worse than Egyptian mortality, which wise men say arises, not from any necessity, but from our own neglect? It is evidently the opinion of the gentlemen, that the ladies ought to do something; it is always the custom for the orator who returns thanks when their healths are drunk, to conclude his speech with a quotation, ending

"When pain and anguish wring the brow,

A ministering angel thou!

Women, in the highest or the lowest ranks, are self-denying and kind enough, we all know. They want little pressing, when they see their way to doing good. There are women ready to nurse our wounded in war time, and women ready to walk the fever hospitals in time of peace; and there are some who have started another good work for the benefit of the little children. The object of the "HOME FOR CONVALESCENT CHILDREN" is, in the words of its founder, "to enable the children of the London poor to enjoy the simplest, yet greatest, of God's blessings-the blessing of fresh pure air for a few weeks in the year."

Some day, perhaps about the time when Sir John Burgoyne's plan for fortifying the metropolis is carried out, London will find itself begirt with a circle of defences, not less national, though in the shape of nursery gardens for the children of the poor. The first of this line of defences has been already planted upon Mitcham Common.

Some day this summer, ladies, when in want of an object for a drivean hour out and an hour in from Belgravia-put a few toys in the carriage, drive down to Mitcham, and inquire for "RUMBOLD'S FARM." It is an old, whitewashed house, just on the edge of the breezy Common-a house with preposterously thick walls. The place is not without its traditions. Cranmer, the Archbishop, who lived close by, is said to have been con

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