cannot flourish on a foreign soil. I question
if the black broth of Sparta would have agreed
with the Lacedæmonian palate if consumed in
an English à la mode beef shop.

Patmos is likewise studded with small
foreign tobacco shops. Limited to the sale of
tobacco mostly, for the cigar is a luxury in
most cases beyond the reach of the exile.
You must remember that abroad you may
obtain a cigar as large as an Epping sausage
(and as damp), as strong as brandy and as fiery
as a red hot poker for a matter of two sous:—
in some parts of Belgium and Germany for one
sou; and that in England the smallest Cuba,
of Minories manufacture, smoked in a minute
and of no particular flavour, costs three half-
pence: a sum! There is, to be sure, a
harmless milk-mild little roll of dark brown
colour, the component parts of which, I
believe, are brown paper, hay, and aromatic
herbs, vended at the charge of one penny.
But what would be the use of one of those
smoke toys to an exile who is accustomed to
wrap himself in smoke as in a mantle; to
smoke by the apertures of his mouth, nostrils,
eyes and ears; to eat cigars, so to speak?
Thus Patmos solaces itself with cut tobacco
(which is good and cheap in England), which
it puffs from meerschaums or short clays, or
rolls up into fragments of foreign newspapers
and makes cigarettes of.

If there exist a peculiarity of Patmos
which I could not, without injustice, avoid
adverting to, it is the pleasure its inhabitants
seem to feel in reading letters. See, as we
saunter down one of Patmos's back streets a
German exile, in a pair of trousers like a
bifurcated carpet bag, stops a braided
Hungarian with a half quartern loaf under his
arm. A sallow Italian (one of Garibaldi's men)
enters speedily unto them, and the three fall
greedily to the perusal of a large sheet of
tissue paper, crossed and re-crossed in red,
and black, and blue ink, patchworked outside
with postage marks of continental frontiers
and Government stamps. Few of these
missives reach their destination without some
curious little scissor marks about the seal,
some suspicious little hot-water blisters about
the wafers, hinting that glazed cocked hats,
and jack-boots, and police spies have had
something to do with their letters between
their postage and their delivery. Indeed, so
well is this paternal solicitude on the part of
foreign governments to know whether their
corresponding subjects write and spell
correctly, known among the refugees, that some
wary exiles have their letters from abroad
addressed to " Mr. Simpson Brown," or " Mr.
Thomas Williams," such and such a street,
London; and as foreign governments are
rather cautious as to how they meddle with
the families of the Browns and the Williams's—
who grow refractory sometimes and post
their letters in the paddle-boxes of war
steamers—the Brown and Williams letters
reach London untampered with.

More exiles reading letters. One nearly
falls over a dog's-meat cart, so absorbed is he
in his correspondence; another, bearded like
the pard, and with a fur cap like an Armenian
Calpack, is shedding hot tears on his
outstretched paper, utterly unconscious of the
astonishment of two town-made little boys,
who have stopped in the very middle of a
"cartwheel" to stare at the "furriner a
crying." Poor fellows! poor broken men!
poor hunted wayfarers! If you, brother
Briton, well clothed, well fed, well cared for
—with X. 99 well paid to guard you—with
houses for the sale of law by retail on every
side, where you can call for your half-pint of
habeas corpus, or your Magna Charta, cold
without, at any hour in the day—if you were
in a strange land, proscribed, attainted, poor,
unfriended, dogged even in your Patmos by
spies; would you warrant yourself not to shed
some scalding tears, even in a fierce fur cap,
over a letter from the home you are never to
see more?

My pencil may limn a few individual
portraits in the perfidious refuge, and then
I must needs row my bark away to other
shores. Stop at forty-six, Levant Street, if
you please, over against Leg-bail Court.

Up four flights of crazy stairs, knocking at
a ricketty door, you enter a suite of three
musty attics. They are very scantily
furnished, but crowded with articles of the most
heterogeneous description; mes marchandises,
as the proprietor calls them. Variegated
shades for lamps, fancy stationery, bon-bon
boxes, lithographic prints, toys, cigar cases,
nicknacks of every description are strewn
upon the chairs and table, and cumber the
very floor; at one window a dark-eyed mild-
looking lady, in a dark merino dress, is
painfully elaborating a drawing on a lithographic
stone; at another a slender girl is bending
over a tambour frame; at a desk a round-
headed little boy is copying music, while in
an adjoining apartment even more denuded
of furniture and littered with marchandises
are two or three little children tumbling
among the card-board boxes. All these
moveables, animate and inanimate, belong to
a Roman Marquis—the Marchese del Pifferare.
He and his have been reared in luxury.
Time was he possessed the most beautiful
villa, the finest equipages, the most valuable
Rafaelles in the Campagna of Rome; but la
politique, as he tells you with a smile, has
brought him down to the level of a species of
unlicensed hawker, going with his wares (to
sell on commission) from fancy warehouse to
fancy warehouse, often rebutted, often insulted;
yet picking up an honest livelihood
somehow. His wife has turned her artistic
talent, and his eldest daughter her taste for
embroidery to account; his son Mithridates
copies music for the orchestra in a theatre,
for living is dear in London, and those helpless
little ones among the card-board boxes
must be looked after. He has been an exile