84 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



in it which is frequented by the large owl of Europe. A fearless 

 adventurer had managed to get a young one out of it the year before, 

 and he had sold it to the gardener at the Colonna palace, who kept 

 it alive in the pleasure-grounds ; and there I paid it a visit generally 

 once a week. Another pair of these noble wanderers of night is 

 said to inhabit the enormous outworks at the top of St Peter's. 

 These birds are very scarce in this part of Italy. 



" As you enter Rome at the Porta del Popolo a little on your 

 right, is the great slaughter-house, with a fine stream of water run- 

 ning through it. It is probably inferior to none in Italy for an 

 extensive plan, and for judicious arrangements. Here some seven 

 or eight hundred pigs are killed on every Friday during the winter 

 season. Nothing can exceed the dexterity with which they are de- 

 spatched. About thirty of these large and fat black pigs are driven 

 into a commodious pen, followed by three or four men, each with a 

 sharp skewer in his hand, bent at one end, in order that it may be 

 used with advantage. On entering the pen these performers, who 

 put you vastly in mind of assassins, make a rush at the hogs, 

 each seizing one by the leg, amid 'a general yell of horror on the 

 part of the victims. Whilst the hog and the man are struggling on 

 the ground, the latter, with the rapidity of thought, pushes his skewer 

 betwixt the fore leg and the body, quite into the heart, and there 

 gives it a turn or two. The pig can rise no more, but screams for a 

 minute or so, and then expires. This process is continued till they 

 are all despatched, the brutes sometimes rolling over the butchers, 

 and sometimes the butchers over the brutes, with a yelling enough 

 to stun one's ears. In the meantime, the screams become fainter 

 and fainter, and then all is silence on the death of the last pig. A 

 cart is in attendance ; the carcases are lifted into it, and it proceeds 

 through the street, leaving one or more dead hogs at the doors of 

 the different pork shops. No blood appears outwardly, nor is the 

 internal hemorrhage prejudicial to the meat, for Rome cannot be 

 surpassed in the flavour of her bacon, or in the soundness of her 

 hams. 



" A day or two after our arrival in the Eternal City, Fathers 

 Glover and Esmonde, of the Professed House of the Society of 

 Jesus, came to see me. We had been school-fellows together, some 



