GERMAN SCHOOLS OF ENGRAVING. 341 



cheerful conversation close to me ; and on looking round, saw 

 a lively young fledgling of a priest, seventeen or eighteen 

 years old, in the most eager and spirited chat with the man 

 in the ,chair. He talked, laughed, and spat, himself, com- 

 panionably, in the merriest way, for a quarter of an hour; 

 evidently without feeling the slightest disgust, or being made 

 serious for an instant, by the aspect of the destroyed creature 

 before him. 



166. His own face was simply that of the ordinary vulgar 

 type of thoughtless young Italians, rather beneath than above 

 the usual standard ; and I was certain, as I watched him, that 

 he was not at all my superior, but very much my inferior, in 

 the coolness with which he beheld what was to me so dread- 

 ful. I was positive that he could look this man in the face, 

 precisely because he could not look, discerningly, at any beau- 

 tiful or noble thing ; and that the reason I dared not, was 

 because I had, spiritually, as much better eyes than the priest, 

 as bodily, than his companion. 



Having got so much of clear evidence given me on the mat- 

 ter, it was driven home for me a week later, as I lauded on 

 the quay of Naples. Almost the first thing that presented 

 itself to me was the sign of a travelling theatrical company, 



lisplaying the principal scene of the drama to be enacted on 

 their classical stage. Fresh from the theatre of Taormina, I 

 was curious to see the subject of the Neapolitan popular 



Irama. It was the capture, by the police, of a man and his 

 wife who lived by boiling children. One section of the police 

 was coming in, armed to the teeth, through the passage ; 

 another section of the police, armed to the teeth, and with 

 high feathers in its caps, was coming up through a trap-door. 

 In fine dramatic unconsciousness to the last moment, like the 

 clown in a pantomime, the child-boiler was represented as still 

 industriously chopping up a child, pieces of which, ready for 

 the pot, lay here and there on the table in the middle of the 

 picture. The child-boiler's wife, however, just as she was 

 taking the top off the pot to put the meat in, had caught a 

 glimpse of the foremost policeman, and stopped, as much in 

 rage as in consternation. 



