reigned without control.  But it never was our author’s habit to stroke the world the wrong way:  “When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner.”  And he adds:  “There is nothing I dread more than to be taken for one of the Smell-fungi of this world.  I therefore endeavor to be pleased with everything about me, and with the masters, mistresses, and servants of the inns, particularly when I perceive they have ’all the dispositions in the world’ to serve me; as Sterne says, ’It is enough for heaven and ought to be enough for me.’”

The traveler was detained at Marseilles, and five weeks at Nice, on one frivolous pretext of the police or another, and did not reach Genoa till the 20th of October.  At Genoa there was a delightful society, and Irving seems to have been more attracted by that than by the historical curiosities.  His health was restored, and his spirits recovered elasticity in the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from them.  The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa seem like home to him was his intimacy with a few charming families, among whom he mentions those of Mrs. Bird, Madame Gabriac, and Lady Shaftesbury.  From the latter he experienced the most cordial and unreserved friendship; she greatly interested herself in his future, and furnished him with letters from herself and the nobility to persons of the first distinction in Florence, Rome, and Naples.

Late in December Irving sailed for Sicily in a Genoese packet.  Off the island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little pickaroon, with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, 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 centre 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