Morning journal and courier., 1890-05-17
wAKEmAn,s JoUnNExINGs.
TcoscLuprn FROM FIRST rAaE.]

womap) cooks the little needed for the labor- CTS. These "masserie" are the ugliest one story stone buildings imaginable. They are invariably set on an elevation to escape a much as possible the universal malaria. Quadrilateral stone walls perhaps thirty feet square rise seven or eight feet high. A DOT ton of the front will be covered with an d. most flat metal or slate roof. Then from the rear wall vaulted arches extend towards the front. These usually contain three sompart- msnts. One, the best of all, is provided with stone managers extending all around 1t for oxen, horses or donkeys; in another the "nasssra" warns the slop given the laoorers; the laborsrs take their mid day siesta and sleep at night. These swarm with vermin; are Althisr and more deGolate than any pris- on known to man; and stand unrslievsd by vine, shrub or tres, repulsive and forbidding silhousttss of stone against . blue Italian sky:
 ern Italian pastoral scenery suggest, as with the ''massarie," human activities and con- phasizs the saddening Loneliness of Italian country scenes. These are the "aja," or raised esrthen or stone threshinR floor, shaped like hollowed truncated cone, where the grain is tron out by blindfolded oxen; the cistsrns, or oistern, for collecting rain
  mer drought-huge structures sunken fully ten feet beneath the surface, with exposed walls as high as one's head, averaging fifty feet in width and two hundred in length, with an ancient windlass in the peak of one end of the low roof; the rough, white stone walls which divide fields like endless barri- cadss; the "casselle," mortarless circular huts of stone, surmounted by rude crosses. in which the field guards and watchers find shelter, recalling the ghostly sentry houses among tho bleach greens in the north of 1re- land; and the "traturo," broad grass grown highway, which for two thousand years has served in different localities, like the vsst stock trails leading "frem grass to grass" when western herds arc driven northward, for tho yearly exodus of Apulian herds to mountain summer pastures.
 But where do these one or two million peasants of southern Italy live, If the coun- try possesses no cabins on the hillsides, on nestling farm houses In the valleysi Every you fifty cities in Italy, below Naples, with populations varying from ten to twenty i've thousand, and think fully one hundred and fifty towns and small cities containing each from five hundred to five thousand souls. There will not as many single persons live between these places as there will average thousands In each. In anoient times all this country was suD1ect 70 scouI8luS uoP.ou0- tions by the Saracens, to an extent requiring that people should herd together in walled towns for protection of life and property. The serfdom of those days is practically un- changed. The nobility and landed aristoc- racy still own every rood of land; still pos sess every herd and flock; still command, under slightly different vassalage, the apa- thetic peasants who till and tend. The lat ter exist within these walled cities in houses insufferable to animals in America. This ii why, startled from your sleep before the
 break of day by what you fancy must be ar army marching beneath your window, or hastsning to the balcony you will see in ths l streets of one town ono thousand, in another five thousand, and in another, as at Tarante and Andria, even ten thousand men, womsr and children, with herds and focks contain ing i've times their number. vending theii | way to the mountain pastures and fields
 And, again, in the gray of the soft Italian twilight. as the sad army of rswardlsss toi drsgs its weary way back into the walled an6 reeking city, your heart blssds at the solder
 hopelessnsss of 1t all, while you thank ths God above for the American blrthright yor own, know and love.
 EDGAR L. WAKEMAH.