best as they understood it. Throughout | ing but a single pear to eat. And yet when On the fifth day also two victims were disinterred alive. The one, a big youth, by trade a tailor, was found lying by the putrefied body of his father. He began to swear freely when he was released, and with professional eagerness demanded to be attired in a seemly coat. "How have you contrived to exist, be him. I had courage," was his reply. "I dug out a corner with my hands, and I had a bottle of vinegar to drink.” But the need was even greater than the supply of aid. Five or six thousand people suddenly deprived of house-room and every (even the commonest) requirements of daily life! Half this population dead, or buried alive in various strata of débrising buried so long a time?" they asked A hand or a head above the stones and timber in one place! Elsewhere the dead and the living jammed together as in a vice! Cries from the heart of huge piles of ruin, as from a tomb! Tears and entreaties from mothers and children that something may be done for their dear ones whose groans they can hear beneath them, but whom they cannot resue ! We English are happy that we know little or nothing of such woe as this of Casamicciola in 1883. "What? Is there any one else alive here?" they inquired anxiously. 66 My hen!" continued the old dame. But it was not a time to trouble about hens. A multitude of anecdotes of escapes well-nigh miraculous are of course current in the place. They abored hard to save the bishop of the island, whose house had fallen in upon him; but it was in vain. For hours they toiled towards him, obeying the directions that came to them from beneath. Softly! Not there. More this way," and so forth. Later, when their efforts to reach him had been of no avail, the bishop's voice grew indistinct, more and more hoarse and feeble. "Save me! save me!" he repeated. Then they heard him groan again and again; and when they came upon him he was dead. More fortunate were two young Neapolitan ladies, the ne twenty years old, and the other seventeen. An iron girder had dropped aslant so as to form an arch over them. But between them and the air lay ten feet of masonry. They were imprisoned thus for sixty-seven hours, with noth This hearty rogue refused the food they offered him, but snatched a flask of Marsala from the hands of a soldier, and, having drunk deeply, walked off unaided towards the beach. In the same house, five hours later, they found his cousin. A table had been his rock of safety, he being underneath it. But the poor fellow was not in good condition. He had sustained himself upon a number of tomatoes within his reach; but the fruit had got impregnated with the fumes of corruption from the dead body of his uncle, and his blood was thus cruelly poisoned. The salvation of those and other poor people may be ascribed to the king. On the second day after the calamity, the stench that exhaled from the prostrate village began to be insupportable. Many of the workers were overcome by it. There was talk of the menace of typhus ; and some spoke of cholera as the result of it. The question was then broached: Ought not the entire place to be covered up with lime? It was a colossal idea, for thousands of men working daily for weeks would not suffice to achieve it, and tens of thousands of tons of lime would be needed. There were arguments in favor of the plan, and many arguments against it. But no steps were taken in the matter until the king himself had visited Casamicciola. It was in truth, however, a hideous proposition. Even the supporters of it granted that in all human probability there were living men and women yet under the ruins; but these were to be sacrificed for the public profit. A uniform depth of six feet of quicklime was to be spread over all the village, making it a grave forever; and the hapless ones who yet lived were thus in theory condemned to a death of the most awful kind conceivable. And so King Humbert came over from Naples, and saw all that was to be seen. | earthquake! The day was set apart for a At times they demurred when a very quest of alms for Casamicciola. A spaghastly spectacle was near, but the king cious wagon was drawn up and down the took affairs into his own hand. "I wish streets of the city, heralded by the wail to see it I ought to see it," he said im- of a trumpet. The Municipal Guard and peratively. "It is horrible. I did not citizens attended the car on foot, and two think there had been such a massacre," ladies dressed in black sat upon the box. he added at length, as they took him from The wagon was inscribed "Casamicciola," one scene of ruin to another. Corpses and the flag of Italy, bound with crape, still lay here and there, bruised and dis- fluttered in front of it. Such a procession figured, half or a quarter exposed to the was well calculated to touch Italian symair. And not all the camphor and pun-pathies. The people sobbed in the gent perfumes in the world could keep off the sickening stench which met them with more and more intensity as they advanced farther and farther into the misshapen village. But after the king's visit all thought of quicklime and decomposing fluids was suspended. Once he was assured that there were yet persons to be saved, his Majesty had put his veto upon the barbarism. He quoted Colletta, the historian of the kingdom of Naples, and his narratives of the earthquakes in Calabria in the last century, and reminded the authorities of the girl Eloisa Basili, who was in 1783 exhumed alive on the twelfth day of her interment. This poor girl was found "hold. ing in her arms a child which had died on the fourth day, and which was therefore by that time quite corrupted. She had been unable to free herself from the dead body, so tightly was she compassed about by the ruin of the house." Colletta says further of her, that from the time of her rescue until she died, in her twenty-fifth year, nine years after the earthquake, she never smiled, and seemed indeed to live in a state of composed indifference. She would neither marry (though she was beautiful), nor go into a convent; but she preferred to sit in solitude under a tree, remote from all dwellings. Whenever she chanced to see a baby, she turned and looked another way. But let us glance from the tragedy itself and see for a moment how Italy and all Europe bestirred themselves on behalf of this bereaved and devastated little place. George Eliot has somewhere derided, and reasonably, what she held to be our insular idea of the typical Italian-a creature in picturesque rags, thankful for halfpence. In truth, however, the Italians are a noblehearted people. I wonder how we of England should have developed had we grown up under the conditions of character nurture that have been upon Italy for the past many a generation! What an extraordinary scene was that in Rome on August 6, eight days after the streets. But they also offered Casamicciola better tribute than tears. The most various of articles showered into the car from the houses on either side of the streets - a bundle of clothes from one story, a shirt from the window above, money tied in a handkerchief from the third floor, and from the attic perchance a pair of earrings, removed by their owner from her ears in haste ere the car should pass on. In the poorer quarters of the city the procession aroused real enthusiasm of generosity. A cobbler ran from his shop and threw into the car the coat he had been wearing. What will you do now?" asked his wife. "You have no other." "Mia cara in this warm weather it's enough if I have my shirt," said he. A cabman likewise stripped himself to his shirt, and gave cloak, coat, waistcoat, and even his watch and chain to the commissioners. A woman untied her apron, and reft her baby of its frock, that she might not be backward in giving. The shopkeepers offered contributions in kind -packets of macaroni, bottles of oil, sausages, and bread. Curious also was the donation of the proprietress of a wine-shop in the Via Monteroni. She gave an iron bedstead (large enough for two), set up for use, with mattresses, pillows, and blankets complete; and with her neighbors' aid this was duly hoisted into the car, upon the other things. It may be imagined that one wagon did not suffice to exhaust such Roman charity as this. A single district contributed four wagon-loads of things. The coppers of the poor were alone enough to fill four and twenty sacks. Milan, too, had its charity procession for Casamicciola, and the other cities of Italy sent what help they could. In all, not less than three million francs came into the hands of the relief committee. It would be very odd, said the cynics, if, with such admirable opportunities, the distributors of the relief were not 1 guilty of maladministration. They went for the relief of those who were buried alive, and will tell with the ghost of a scoff of the dilettante way in which the toilers worked. "Hush!" one of them would say on a sudden, as they passed a heap of ruin, "I hear a voice!" For a moment they would pause, stand with distended ears, perhaps lie with the cheek to the ground, and the next moment be convinced that they were deceived. "It was nothing But such calamities as Casamicciola's in 1883 cannot be atoned for wholly by charitable collections. As a health resort, Casamicciola is ruined. Perhaps in a decade or two it will begin to hold up its head again. For the present, it is left to brood over its misfortune. The tourists of the nations, if they come to it, take every-only a fragment of a wall giving way precaution that they be not left a single underneath." Then they would pass by night in its midst. They view its moun- on the other side. tain through their opera glasses from the seashore or the deck of the steamer, perhaps even venture to eat their dinner within ten minutes' walk of the remains of the village, and then withdraw satiated. As for staying in the neighborhood, they would as soon take up temporary abode in a churchyard vault. It was, therefore, with an air of pleased surprise the other day that the proprietor of the one little makeshift of a hotel in the place (with beds for four) agreed to receive me for a night or two when I requested it. He, poor fellow, had lost sadly by the earthquake. His earlier hotel was a large building, much frequented, and the source of a steady income. But it went to the ground with the rest, and it lies still where it fell. For tunately, the landlord was not in at the time; and by some miracle he had also contrived to retain possession of a family of ten fine young men and women, his children. It will have to be a very shrewd earthquake to touch them hardly a second time, for the new hotel is the lightest of single-story châlets, with no roofing except a sheet of galvanized iron. A blow of the fist staggers the thin, wooden walls of the building; and one goes to bed in it with some fancy that one zephyr stronger than another may at any moment prove to a marvel that the house is famously collapsible. Much, however, may be forgiven to a hotel the bedrooms of which let immediately upon a garden of orange-trees and flowers, and whence one views to perfection the blue bay of Naples beyond. Perhaps it is hardly fair to give absolute credence to the stories of a man with so keen a grudge against nature in his heart as the landlord of this poor little hotel. But, in the face of official reports, mine host assures his guest that many a luckless villager was stifled prematurely, and even consumed alive, by the acids and lime which were eventually dispersed about the ruins of Casamicciola. He makes light, too, of the various endeavors 3787 LIVING AGE. VOL. LXXIII. He tells, moreover, of the periodical visits of the Subscribed Funds Committee. These gentlemen were positively embarrassed by Europe's generosity. Had less money been accumulated, the distribution would have been made more equitably, and without scandal. As it was, this was the manner of it. Every other day or so, for a while, the committee chartered a special steamer from Naples, and arrived in the island with a bag of gold. Before proceeding to work they breakfasted. And such breakfasts! They brought divers wines with them in the steamer, and all Ischia was requisitioned for wines and fruits of the first quality for the table. While they ate and drank (and they did not spare the wine), the people outside clamored for the alms that Europe had sent them. But the Casamicciola police kept these impatient and importunate ones aloof. Only when the commissioners had well feasted did the work of charity begin. And then what a farce it was! The repleted worthies hurriedly made the tour of the district, or listened with cigars in their mouths to the tales of the petitioners, who had lost fathers or husbands (breadwinners in one form or another), and at the judgment of the moment gave according to their pleasure; here twenty francs; there ten; to an unprepossessing claimant nothing at first, but a gold piece if he worried the commissioners by his intolerable persistence; and so on till the bag was empty. This done, the officials returned to Naples with their responsibilities discharged ! Amid all this smoke there may be a spark or two of fire; but I, for one, do not care to singe my fingers by groping for it. I happened to arrive in Casamicciola on the eve of a festa. They had shown me the ruined village, with its hot springs bubbling idly away and never a patient to profit by them, and babbled of the disaster in so distressful a minor key that I was heart and soul with the place at the instant to a routine of prayer and unbearable privations. Epomeo is two thousand six hundred and twenty-five feet above the sea. The hermit's temperature is therefore much cooler than that of Casamicciola. In winter he is snowed upon, and at all times the clouds help to keep his chambers moist. He is not a hermit of any religious order; nor is he a regular priest with a passion for solitude. No one can say he serves any particular purpose, except it be to do what his predecessors did-ring the church bell at noon; and shoot the small birds and quails which come among the crags of his high quarters as if they supposed that here, at all events, they were assured of a retreat from the guns of mankind. of its downfall. And from the village we had strolled below to the seashore with bare walls and cottages with big cracks obliquely across them ever about us. Here we were met by the procession of priests and banners, and mahogany-colored men and women in their best clothes, with a string band in the van. It was a suggestive scene. The very church whence they filed had a gaping seam upon its forehead. The houses (new, for the most part, and as light and small and bandboxy as the hotel) were beset with Madonna statues at the corners; and within, one saw the paintings of more Madonnas, with lighted lamps before them. On the way, the procession passed another church that was no longer a church. Only the façade of it stood erect, with the inscription on its pediment "To the glory of God," etc. This hermit inhabits a suite of apartBehind was an agonizing heap of broken ments hewn in the rocky peak of the walls, twisted iron, and fallen rafters. mountain-bedroom, buttery, kitchen, reAdjacent, too, was the ruin of an eating- fectory, stables, and I know not what else. house. The word "restaurant" still in- At one time the little church of St. Nicovited the wayfarer to set foot within it, las, adjacent to him, was richly provided though the body had no more chance of with friars. The panels of the seats they entertainment here than the soul of solace occupied still cling to the chilly refectory in the church hard by. But the trumpets walls. But their day has gone by, and the brayed through the street with a tumult hermit is their sole representative. In the of triumph; the banners blew out; the nave of the church is a flat tombstone with priests held themselves strongly through an iron ring in it. The well-like vault it all; and the eager-eyed peasants buzzed underneath contains a medley of what is their murmurs of delight. No doubt pro- left of the previous hermits. But the cessions and porcelain Madonnas at the recluse of to-day is not doomed to lie upon corners of the houses are a vigorous anti- the remains of his predecessors. He tells dote to fear. They are certainly worth with a gleeful twinkle of the eye of the more than the certificates of security of recent act of Parliament which forbids professors who assume to feel the pulse such interments. When he dies, he will of the earth. Moreover, even my carping get comfortable quarters in a lowland landlord placed me in a bedroom the chief grave. But his life is so healthy, and he ornament in which was a brace of bul- is so robust, that he cannot possibly die lock's horns nearly three feet in height, ere the middle of the next century. mounted singly, and set erect upon marble pedestals. The horns were as emphatic and recognized a plea for good fortune as the Madonnas. Some prefer to fix them outside the houses, one at each end of the roof; but my host used them as bedside amulets. Typhoeus is but a scurvy giant if he cannot keep his sufferings to himself for a period, in acknowledgment of these diverse appeals for pity. I have already mentioned Monte Epomeo. For at least a century or two it has been the custom in Ischia to keep a hermit on the top of this mountain, which looks so steeply upon Casamicciola. The man is worth seeing, if only to disabuse one of the notion that a hermit is essentially, in look and act, an ascetic. He is in fact a strong, stout fellow, by no means devoted Being asked if he, like the rest of Ischia, lived in perpetual terror of earthquakes, this happy, irresponsible man replied that he had other things to occupy him. Moreover, he was firm in his belief that the part of the mountain in which his house was chiselled could not be dislodged, though Typhoeus gave ever so mighty a heave. In 1883, Epomeo broke beneath him, and hurled its fragments down upon the ruins of Casamicciola. But the hermitage stood fast. Quoting some words from the sole literary treasure he possessed- a ragged Visitors' Book- he might have said: "From the mountain's height I contemplate the misery of mor tals;" though truly, to an energetic mind, his own unconscionable inactivity were a misery beyond all. And yet there was something taking Σ about the man's simplicity. He was jubi lant as a child because he could add to our luncheon on the mountain-top a wee bit of a bird he had shot that day. He broiled it lightly over the charcoal, and served it in its blood. His vineyard was not more than a stone's cast below him. It grew a detestable wine, fit for none but a self-mortifying hermit. The toil it afforded him; his flaccid thought about life and the nether world of mortals; the noontide bell, and his orisons, made up the sum of his affairs. A stranger pic nicking on his terrace (whence there is a sheer precipice) makes a gala day for him. And he is charmed to show to such an one every spectacle of his domain, from the morsels of skulls and locks of hair in the church's reliquary to his chill bedchamber with its green, damp walls, and the broad prospect of sea and land at his feet. My landlord in Casamicciola condemned this hermit as the liver of a disgraceful life. His may not be the life of much potential good, but he would surely have more chance elsewhere to fall into yet deeper disgrace. It was a breathless summer morn when I left Ischia, with a steely, unruffled sea. From the deck of the steamer the white, purpled head of Epomeo and the green vale at its base (with ruined Casamicciola hidden from sight) were quite bewitching. The luncheon-carrier, Michael, had, with winning ingenuousness, the other day at parting squeezed my hand between his two brown palms, while he said, somewhat plaintively: "You will come again, will you not? Here, too, by the steamer's side, the dolorous landlord of the little hotel gave me farewell in like terms. Four bedrooms, and never a guest for a week at a time! Six years ago, and twoscore bedrooms besieged by applicants for beds! The contrast is harrowing. Why does not a modern St. George (not a professor of seismology, but some valorous free-lance of science) get at the fell giant Typhoeus, and slay him once and for all? Such an one may be promised a statue upon Epomeo in the stead of the hermitage and the hermit. From Blackwood's Magazine. ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE. The other sights of Ischia are mainly of the rural kind. Over against the capital there is a stream of lava, still black, which burst from the crater of Epomeo in 1302. Since that time earthquakes have been MR. KINGLAKE could scarcely be called the sole indication of subterranean activity a contributor to Blackwood, for he never in Ischia. On the south side of the island wrote in it but once, when a sentence there is less verdure. The mountain is which he had intended to be introductory here riven by several very steep ravines, to the narrative of an incident in the the white tufa of which glares intolerably French Revolution grew into a paper in the sunlight. One is confronted every-highly characteristic of its writer. But where by caverns in the tufa, artificial, for more than thirty years he had been with padlocked gates to them. In these the close friend of the late and then of the caves the peasants store their wine. You may buy fifty litres of mellow "Ischia bianco,' thus cellared, for about fifty pence. Ischia is not more than twenty miles in circuit, and as it is furrowed by tracks in all parts the tour of the isle exacts but a day. I made this excursion on a stiffeared ass, with, for guide, a man who had lost ten relations by the earthquake. Not. withstanding his wholesale bereavement, this poor fellow was quick to smile and jest. Perhaps he had come all of a sudden on that 28th July to the state of the philos. opher to whom life is but a farce, dashed here and there with the semblance of tragedy. Be that as it may, it was odd to hear him tell of the finding and burial in one heap of his wife and children, and his brothers and their wives and children, much as if he were recounting a story from the "Arabian Nights." present editor of this magazine, in which his writings were frequently the subject of discussion; and they have been the publishers of the successive volumes of his well-known history of the War in the Crimea, the first of which appeared in 1863 and the last in 1887; throughout which period their relations of business and of friendship were close and constant. It is fitting, therefore, that these pages should contain some tribute to one who leaves a name so eminent in literature, and who lived on terms so intimate, not only with the conductors of this magazine, but with many of their friends and contributors. It is affirmed on excellent authority that Kinglake was born, not as commonly stated in 1811, but in 1809. He went to Cambridge in 1828, and was the contemporary there of Tennyson, Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, and others who rose to |