in poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and
stilettos and pistols stuck in their waistbands. The pirates thoroughly
ransacked the vessel, opened all the trunks and portmanteaus, but found
little that they wanted except brandy and provisions. In releasing the
vessel, the ragamuffins seem to have had a touch of humor, for they gave
the captain a "receipt" for what they had taken, and an order on the
British consul at Messina to pay for the same. This old-time courtesy
was hardly appreciated at the moment.

Irving passed a couple of months in Sicily, exploring with some
thoroughness the ruins, and making several perilous inland trips, for the
country was infested by banditti. One journey from Syracuse through the
center of the island revealed more wretchedness than Irving supposed
existed in the world. The half-starved peasants lived in wretched cabins
and often in caverns, amid filth and vermin. "God knows my mind never
suffered so much as on this journey," he writes, "when I saw such scenes
of want and misery continually before me, without the power of
effectually relieving them." His stay in the ports was made agreeable by
the officers of American ships cruising in those waters. Every ship was
a home, and every officer a friend. He had a boundless capacity for
good-fellowship. At Messina he chronicles the brilliant spectacle of
Lord Nelson's fleet passing through the straits in search of the French
fleet that had lately got out of Toulon. In less than a year Nelson's
young admirer was one of the thousands that pressed to see the remains of
the great admiral as they lay in state at Greenwich, wrapped in the flag
that had floated at the masthead of the Victory.

From Sicily he passed over to Naples in a fruit boat which dodged the
cruisers, and reached Rome the last of March. Here he remained several
weeks, absorbed by the multitudinous attractions. In Italy the worlds of