Mr. T. C. Murray Aynsley writes to The Times a
very remark- able account of his capture by brigands near Salerno on the 15th inst. He and a friend., with their wives, were driving from Paestum to Salerno, when their carriage was stopped by an armed band of brigands, dressed in uniform, who called themselves soldiers of Francese Secondo. The ladies were left in the carriage, but Mr. Aynsley and his friend were compelled to follow the brigands into the woods. They were treated with the utmost kindness, and even tenderness, the brigands breaking down hedges for them to get through, carrying them over streams, giving them ,cloaks to sit upon and dry roots to sleep on at night, refusing to take their cash or jewellery, and conversing on political and other subjects with great affability. They were greatly astonished at hearing that in England there were no brigands, and that the law was supreme. Mr. Aynsley was compelled to write to the friends of two peasants whom they had also captured to demand ransoms. On the following day they decided that Mr. Aynsley or his companion should go to Naples and collect money from the English residents for a ransom, the other being detained as a hostage. The lot fell upon Mr. Ayusley to go. He had not left them more than two or three minutes when he met a detachment of soldiers, who fired at the brigands, but most inexplicably do not seem to have succeeded in capturing any of them or releasing Mr. Aynsley's companion. That gentleman is still in the hands of the brigands, and the ransom demanded is greater than his friends seem likely to raise. If the details of Mr. Aynsley's rather apocryphal story be correct, there has been great remissness on the part of the Italian Government in the district in question. The band marched through the open country in broad daylight.
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