let me do something innocent and kind, for the
sake of old times!"

She felt her eyes moistening, and silently
turned away.

That night no rest came to her. That night
the roused forces of Good and Evil fought their
terrible fight for her soul—and left the strife
between them still in suspense when morning
came. As the clock of York Minster struck nine,
she followed Mrs. Wragge to the chaise, and
took her seat by the captain's side. In a quarter
of an hour more, York was in the distance: and
the high road lay bright and open before them
in the morning sunlight.

       THE END OF THE SECOND SCENE.

                     MY DUNGEONS.

                MY FIRST DUNGEONS.

AFTER ten years' burial in the dungeons of the
Bourbon, deeply as I am filled with horror at
the recollection of what I have seen and suffered,
I know not by what words to make known my
experience to those whose imagination is not
helped by living, or by having lived, under the grip
of a tyranny convulsed with its own death-throes.
The throe of Italian tyranny is at an end, the
prisons have been opened for those captives to
whom that had been crime in Naples which was
virtue in England, and is virtue also now in
Italy. But what that tyranny was like when it
claimed mastery over eight millions of us, I,
who have worn its chains and borne its stripes,
now wish to tell. In simple, unimpassioned
words, as few as may suffice, I will relate faithfully
what I myself know of the dark day my
country has outlived.

Ferdinand the Second of Naples, during his
reign—twenty-nine years—endeavoured to
secure the fidelity of his people by beheading eight
hundred and ninety-seven honest citizens, whose
crime was that they did not like him, and by
imprisoning eight thousand six hundred and
twenty one victims: not always because of
patriotism, but sometimes, also, because of a
bare suspicion that they loved their country:
sometimes, also, by reason of private hatred,
which had no readier way of destroying an
enemy than his denunciation as a patriot.
Besides the men imprisoned, more than two
hundred thousand of this king's subjects, all the
good men left out of prison, moved about under
the constant surveillance of a vast body of
spies and policemen, and were in hourly danger
of arrest and imprisonment at the discretion
of irresponsible authority. For the forty-fourth
time, a revolt broke out in Messina and Calabria,
in September, eighteen 'forty-seven. How
it failed; how the king swore to a constitution,
and then perjuring himself, butchered his
subjects in his capital; I need not tell. The
province of Reggio took up arms for the
betrayed constitution, but it contained no
Garibaldi, and throve ill. The king offered free
pardon to those who would lay down their arms,
and it was broken up. But the rebels who went
peaceably home on the faith of the king's
promise, were marked and tracked and hunted down
in detail. A long list of liberals and suspected
liberals was made out, and an army of spies,
mercenaries, and gendarmes was scattered
abroad to secure the arrest and conviction of all
persons whom that list condemned. It was the
honour of my life as well as its danger that my
name was written in that list. For two years I
concealed myself from the enemy, but by so
doing I caused incessant molestation to my
friends; therefore I gave myself up—not to
justice, but to the strong arm whereby justice
had for the time been banished from the land.
Every care was taken to make my trial look like
a lawful trial. A special criminal court was
assembled for the occasion. There had been many
public trials of constitutionalists, of fair seeming
to those outside the kingdom, ignorant of the
operations of the camarilla.

The Neapolitan camarilla was the whole
working absolutist party, from the king's titled
supporters down to the scum of the land,
obedient to bribe and bidding. It took its name
after the fatal first of May, when that whole
party organised itself into an active government
conspiracy for the destruction of the liberals by
death, exile, imprisonment, and a well-organised
machinery of terror. What the chiefs planned,
the intendentes of the different provinces
executed by means of police machinery, ramifying
into the remotest hamlet. During the short
life of the Neapolitan constitution, a large body
of officers who had been working out the
absolutist system were dismissed, to be afterwards
restored. They spent their vacation in marking
the men who then made themselves prominent
as workers of the constitution. Some Bourbonites
had during that interval affected to be liberals,
and had thus been admitted into the liberal
clubs, where they made note of the members
and of the degrees of their repugnance to a form
of government that recognised no popular rights.
From the reports of such men and others less
respectable, the camarilla lists of condemned
and suspected citizens were afterwards drawn
up: names being distinguished as those of men
who were to be arrested only, and of men who
were to be particularly punished. Informers
were appointed to secure in each case the
desired character of conviction; the witnesses,
members of the camarilla, whom they were to
call, were named to them; and if in one district
the requisite amount of testimony were not to be
had, it was made up by testimony from afar.
The same witness would appear in different
cases, and swear that he had been in two or
three different places at one time: nobody offering
to compare a man's testimony given against
one prisoner with his conflicting testimony
against the victim of another trial. When no
charge could be fastened on a man nevertheless
known to desire the freedom of his country, the
police concealed in his house when they searched
it, damnatory papers which they found at their
next visit. A member of the camarilla could, without
himself appearing in the matter, sometimes