Bad as the misrule at Naples had been, its consequences had been felt far less there than in Sicily; and the peasantry had that attachment to the soil which gives birth to so many of the noblest as well as of the happiest feelings.

In all the islands the people were perfectly frantic with joy when they saw the Neapolitan colours hoisted.
At Procida, Troubridge could not procure even a rag of the tri-coloured flag to lay at the king's feet: it was rent into ten thousand pieces by the inhabitants, and entirely destroyed.

"The horrid treatment of the French," he said, "had made them mad." It exasperated the ferocity of a character which neither the laws nor the religion under which they lived tended to mitigate.

Their hatred was especially directed against the Neapolitan revolutionists; and the fishermen, in concert among themselves, chose each his own victim, whom he would stiletto when the day of vengeance should arrive.

The head of one was sent off one morning to Troubridge, with his basket of grapes for breakfast; and a note from the Italian who had, what he called, the glory of presenting it, saying, he had killed the man as he was running away, and begging his excellency to accept the head, and consider it as a proof of the writer's attachment to the crown.