enabled me to see distinctly his person and dress. He was rather above
the middle stature, slender, but with well-turned limbs; his countenance
was remarkably intelligent, his eye hazel but full and strong, his front
was smooth and unwrinkled, and but for some grey hairs, which appeared
silvering his brown and curly locks, he might have been supposed to have
hardly reached the middle age; his nose was aquiline, the expression of
the lower part of his countenance remarkably sweet, and when he spoke to
our guide, which he did with uncommon fluency in the Neapolitan dialect,
I thought I had never heard a more agreeable voice, sonorous yet gentle
and silver-sounded. His dress was very peculiar, almost like that of an
ecclesiastic, but coarse and light; and there was a large soiled white
hat on the ground beside him, on which was fastened a pilgrim's cockle
shell, and there was suspended round his neck a long antique blue
enamelled phial, like those found in the Greek tombs, and it was attached
to a rosary of coarse beads. He took up his hat, and appeared to be
retiring to another part of the building, when I apologised for the
interruption we had given to his studies, begged him to resume them, and
assured him that our stay in the building would be only momentary, for I
saw that there was a cloud over the sun, the brightness of which was the
cause of our retiring. I spoke in Italian; he replied in English,
observing that he supposed the fear of contracting the malaria fever had
induced us to seek the shelter of the shade: but it is too early in the
season to have much reasonable fear of this insidious enemy; yet, he
added, this bottle which you may have observed here at my breast, I carry
about with me, as a supposed preventive of the effects of malaria, and as
far as my experience, a very limited one, however, has gone, it is
effectual. I ventured to ask him what the bottle might contain, as such
a benefit ought to be made known to the world. He replied, "It is a
mixture which slowly produces the substance called by chemists chlorine,
which is well known to be generally destructive to contagious matters;