CHAPTER XI.
ANTONELLI.
He was born in a den of thieves.

His native place, Sonnino, is more celebrated in the history of crime than all Arcadia in the annals of virtue.

This nest of vultures was hidden in the southern mountains, towards the Neapolitan frontier.

Roads, impracticable to mounted dragoons, winding through brakes and thickets; forests, impenetrable to the stranger; deep ravines and gloomy caverns,--all combined to form a most desirable landscape, for the convenience of crime.

The houses of Sonnino, old, ill-built, flung pell-mell one, upon the other, and almost uninhabitable by human beings, were, in point of fact, little else than depots of pillage and magazines of rapine.