Excerpt from Vestigia<br><br>IT was nearly five o'clock of a raw and windy afternoon in the month of March, 187 when a young man, Bernardino de' Rossi by name, came hastily out of an inner room of the Telegraph Office building at Leghorn, letting the heavy swinging door close sharply behind him with a disagreeable sound.<br><br>The room which he entered was one reserved for the use of the Government clerks. Its floor was bare; its high walls, painted the same dull uniform yellow as the rest of the building, were lighted from above by a row of small square win dows, crossed with rusty bars of iron,-an ar rangement which involuntarily suggested a prison ward and there was little to contradict this fancy in the appearance of the line of high desks ranged along three sides of the room, or in the expression of the figures bending over' them.<br><br>The names and dates and rude caricatures scrawled over every available space of plaster and woodwork seemed indeed an indication that such absorbed industry was not the invariable rule; but on that especial afternoon a dead si lence prevailed. Lto one accustomed to the ways of the place it was a significant silence, broken only by the monotonous ticking Of the telegraph wires heard through the half-open door of the adjoining room, and the rapid scratching of many pens.<br><br>At De Rossi's entrance one of the younger clerks, a mere lad, with pale watery eyes and a Jewish profile, looked up from his writing.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.