For two weeks the Merle had been lying at anchor at Naples. From Nice she had run first to Elba; thence she had doubled north again and rounded Corsica; she had touched at Calvi and Ajaccio; and lastly, running through the Straits of Bonifacio, she had held on east-southeasterly to her present anchorage off the Castle.

Despite the novel pleasures of command, Taberman felt Jack's absence so much as at times to be almost unhappy, even at times a little inclined to be resentful. He was still too boyish not to feel that to leave a yacht for a girl was the height of madness, if not of idiocy; and while he was too loyal to Jack to confess this feeling even to himself, it would at times rise in his mind, especially when he felt more than usually lonely. On his arrival at any port Jerry experienced to the full the excitement which even the oldest traveler feels in some degree at entering a new town. Whenever the port officer appeared in his official dignity, another sensation was added in the fear of detection and apprehension. A reaction would set in with the departure of the easily satisfied official, and Jerry would go mooning about with his hands in his pockets, whistling some spiritless tune until the time came to get up anchor and sail anew.

At Naples, however, things went somewhat better with Jerry than at any of his previous ports. In the first place even Jerry, unÆsthetic as he was, could not escape the magic of the beautiful bay and the surroundings which opened up before him in the morning light as he approached the city. He said to himself, half as if in excuse for being so much pleased by mere scenery, that it looked as it should. It had, as it were, kept faith with him; and its beauty was to him an honest fulfillment of its fame. The gray cone of Vesuvius, palpably and gratifyingly like the pictures, stood at the head of the bay, crowned with an inky cloud of smoke. Away from it to the south stretched the cliffs of blue Sorrento and bluer Capri, melting magically into a background of hills or of the azure sky. On the north of the smoking cone a stretch of shadow-wrought shore, and then Naples itself, from the old Spanish fort on the water-front to the Castle of St. Elmo, long and gray, crowning the summit of the ridge behind, and the stone-pines silhouetted like palms against the sapphire sky. Naples, with its great four-square houses of pink, and white, and yellow, heaped, as it were, one above another; its red-tiled roofs, its terraces tricked out with vines or fig-trees; Naples, with its church roofs of variegated tiles, its long quays yellowish gray about the shore—Jerry could well have believed himself in some enchanted picture city, a city which might almost be expected to vanish suddenly if one should close the book it graced.

Behind the Government Mole were lying five Italian battleships, their big red, white, and green flags floating over their sterns, and everywhere over the liquid blue of the bay sailed fisher-craft and small boats, gilded with the morning light.

Scarcely was the Merle's anchor down than the yacht was surrounded by a gay flotilla of boats, all laden with piles of fruit or vegetables, and manned by crews as noisy as they were picturesque. Baskets heaped with figs, great piles of green melons, lemons, citrons, plums, fresh vegetables of all sorts, were there; and each ware was extolled by the vendors with vociferous volubility, until the ears of Jerry fairly sang with the din. From the crowding boats screamed blowsy, dark-eyed women with brown oval faces and raiment of reds and yellows; boys with Greek faces and slim bare arms yelled with shrill voices; doddering old men, sitting in the stern-sheets of skiffs pulled by impish youngsters, waved impotent hands and moved toothless mouths whose sounds were lost in the feverish uproar; stalwart market-men, with brown, wrinkled faces and hairy bosoms exposed, fought their way through the press, disregarding age, sex, and condition in their effort to be nearest the possible purchasers on the Merle; all around the yacht the piratical water-peddlers made a floating Pandemonium, at which the Yankee crew stared not only in surprise but with some appearance of not unnatural alarm.

As an opposing bulwark to this flood of southern vivacity, old Gonzague alone stood as the spokesman of the yacht. Requested by Jerry to make the vendors "stow their jaw," he laid about him right and left with a profane volubility which outdid even that of the assailants. The old man had not spoken Italian for so long that he might well be supposed to have forgotten it, but the occasion found him splendidly adequate to all the requirements of the situation. The Neapolitans raved and pleaded, execrated and lowered their prices, with appeals to the Madonna and all the saints to witness their honesty and their liberality; but once the floodgates of Gonzague's Italian were opened, he dealt with them so eloquently and so roundly, his objurgations were so much more picturesque and more emphatic than any they could compass, that one by one they drew away baffled, calling on high Heaven and the blessed Virgin to protect them when Vesuvius should belch forth a torrent of fire to overwhelm this blasphemous and impious vecchiastro.

Gonzague was perhaps sustained under the volleys of curses which the defeated bumboat men and women threw back at him, by the admiration with which he was regarded by the crew of the Merle. They had come to idolize the old man, and to look upon him with roughly affectionate wonder. The beauty of the scenes through which they had been passing in the Mediterranean had of course impressed them very little Æsthetically, and Naples with its matchless bay they saw only with the eyes of Isle au Haut fishermen. They were, however, never tired of wonders. The childlike sailor nature is always easily touched by the marvelous, and a real volcano was something worth seeing. As long as the Merle was in sight of Vesuvius they would hang over the rail and watch it for hours. If the smoke ceased they would cluster together and discuss the probable causes; they would talk of the mountain as if it were a conscious monster, lying in wait for prey, whose every movement was to be watched with a view to detecting the sinister design that must lie behind it. When a great dun cloud would suddenly puff up from the cone, the men would greet it with deep exclamations half of awe and half of applause. Continually they beset Gonzague with questions, as if he were the keeper or the high priest of this fiery monster. They apparently had complete confidence that Gonzague could explain it all if he would. His knowledge of the language and such use of it as he made in dispersing the voluble rabble of vendors were exactly in the line of their understanding, and they followed his every movement with an admiration amusingly tinged with something not unlike uncouth reverence.

On the afternoon of his arrival at Naples Taberman had gone ashore. He had landed at the steamship quay, and passed half the night in an aimless ramble. There is something about Naples at night which goes to the head like wine; especially if the head is young and set on the shoulders of one who has never before known the life of southern cities. Jerry walked from the railroad station to the Public Gardens, and from the Mola to the HÔtel Britannique upon the heights. He attempted no systematic exploration, but simply wandered with no other object than the simple delight of rambling. By daylight the picturesque streets; the variegated rabble, ragged, dirty, beautiful, impudent, at once repulsive and enchanting; the crooked, crowded ways that climb the hill; the awnings, the heaps of fruit, the strange wares, the familiar air of the family life which made of the streets a home, and seemed to turn all the inhabitants of the town into one huge family; the unconsciously artistic groups, the tumbling bambini, the women, bold, piquant, handsome, or ugly with a hideousness of which Jerry had never conceived,—all these things passed before him like the whirling shows of an opium dream. As night fell, and the lights appeared, the scenes through which he went half dazed and wholly delighted took on a new quality of the weird and fantastic. The flaring lamps, the mysterious shadows, the blazing colors which not even the night could subdue, the theatrical effects seen down the narrow streets as on a stage set for opera, the inexhaustible vivacity, which seemed not to diminish with the lateness of the hour, all blended in an intoxicating experience such as Taberman had never known, and indeed such as had never come into his liveliest fancy.

The next day Jerry went ashore in the morning, and set himself to more regular sight-seeing under the care of a professional guide. He went over the famous Museum, saw Vergil's Tomb, Posilipo, Sanazar's house, and Marti's pozzo. After a capital luncheon in one of the cafÉs in the Arcade, he rejoined his guide, who took him to the Aquarium. On the way they stopped at the Royal Palace and the Morro, Tab being duly impressed by the grandeur of royalty and the majesty of the law. Continually he wished that Jack were with him, for he had so fallen into the habit of depending on Jack for opinions that without his friend his impressions seemed to lack the clearness of sanction. When it came to the Aquarium, however, not only did the things he had seen in his day's explorations fade from his mind, but he was too delighted not to know exactly what he felt.

The Aquarium of Naples is by far the most wonderful in the world. It is smaller and less elaborate than others, as, for instance, that of the Trocadero, but it outranks all in interest and impressiveness. The virtue of the place lies in its simplicity of construction and in the rarity of its exhibits. A sense of restful shadow and coolness succeeding to outside glare and heat; a dim greenish light in broad, glass-faced tanks of sea-water; an odd feeling of being fathoms deep in a tropical sea,—these are the sensations the visitor has first in this wonderful home of strange fish in exile.

Tab made the rounds half a dozen times before he could bring himself to leave. Quite unscientific, but as enthusiastic as a boy, he stood in front of each tank, and tried vainly to determine which was most fascinating. Here were spiny lobster-like crustacea, spotted with a dozen colors; there were beautiful fish with shining iridescent sides and waving filmy, vaporous tails; one tank was inhabited by repulsive, warty octopi, splotched with dull browns and plague-spots of ugly red, which melted and slimed about, so disgusting that they seemed almost obscene; from another a huge sea python, with body as large as the thigh of a man and a head like that of a bald wolf, seemed to grin with sinister, snarling face at Jerry, while all about the monster bloated globe-fish and distorted marine shapes swam and circled; in a corner tank a brood of asp-like fish, with skins that seemed of richest velvet, dusky and wonderful in hue, lay heaped like incarnate poison; and near by the angel-fish went waving and trailing their way about the sand. Jerry was perhaps most impressed, however, by the mysterious life which went on in a tank to which he came among the last. Thin, slow-waving filaments of colorless jelly, crowned with diaphanous cups, not differing greatly from the poppy-flower in shape; and near them other forms, transparent, hardly more than condensed sea-water in appearance, yet with slow pulsations, continuous and wonderful, of phosphoric sparks,—as if one saw life itself throbbing rhythmically in the pellucid hairs of jelly.

Jerry had not been so completely happy since he parted from Jack. He reveled in a boyish delight, and let no wonder of the place escape him. He tipped the keeper to feed the octopi with young crabs, lowered on a string; he took a smart electric shock from a morose torpedo which lay sulkily in a small open tub with a pebbly bottom; he had the big anemones and the coral-polyps "put to sleep," in the words of his guide,—an operation consisting simply of the moving in the water of a small stick which caused them to close in alarm; he did, in a word, everything his guide could think of for him to do, and went away in the end only half content to leave.

After the Aquarium, Jerry turned a deaf ear to the alluring speeches of the guide, the burden of whose song was all of curiosities unseen and of pleasures untasted. He paid the importunate manikin, and made his way back to the Merle. The truth was that he had seen something which thoroughly pleased him, and after that it was impossible to return to the perfunctory seeing of regulation sights which really did not take hold of him in the least.

Before the first week was ended, Jerry had visited Pompeii and BaiÆ, and what was to be seen of Herculaneum. He had made some purchases; and then he began to wait about, ashore or aboard, for Jack. That gentleman had written no response to Tab's letter announcing the arrival of the Merle at Naples, and Jerry could only think of him as so absorbed in his wooing as to have forgotten all about his friend. Some not unnatural jealousy began to ferment in his mind, and did not add to his comfort. By the advice of Gonzague he took the market-boat, and setting out early one morning he sailed with a couple of the men across the bay to Capri, where he passed the day. The only thing which cheered him on his lonely expedition was a tarantella, which was danced for his diversion by a romantic-looking raggaza, with black eyes and short petticoats. The moonlight sail back would have pleased him more had it not been necessary to keep the men rowing for two thirds of the way. On the whole, Jerry could find nothing to please him on land or sea.

The major part of the next week he had spent stretched out in a cane chaise longue in the cockpit, drinking iced sangaree and reading Didron's ArtÉmise. He had a fly stretched over the awning for increased coolness, and the "dusters" put up to shut out the glare from the water; there, like some melancholy monarch beneath his canopy, he read, dozed, and grumbled—without even the satisfaction of any fit audience—from morning to sundown.

In the cool of the evening he usually went ashore, and one night he was strolling along the water-front, stick in hand and his Panama set well back on his head. As he passed the HÔtel du Vesuve, wondering when Jack would arrive, a small figure moved quickly in front of him and bowed. At first he was startled, but almost instantly he saw that it was the valet de place who had gone about with him in the early days of his stay at Naples.

"Hello," said Jerry in surprise, yet not without a feeling of satisfaction at finding even this apology for a companion.

"Buon' sera, signor," responded the little man vivaciously. "How do? You tek-a de night air? É verament' un' bellissima notte. It mek-a cool, eh?"

And he waved his arms expressively.

He might have been thirty or thirty-five, and had coarse black hair, with fiery eyes. He was not ill-looking, but his clothes were hopelessly threadbare and his face pinched. He bore dark circles under his eyes, and was in no way markedly different from others of his numerous and futile class, who, with a smattering of French, German, or English, struggle desperately for a livelihood by acting, not always very virtuously, as guides for traveling forestieri.

"You busy?" Jerry asked, a sudden thought striking him.

"No—no," replied the Neapolitan, his face as eager as his tone. "What-a you like see? Eh? Some of dose oder curiosities forse?" he asked with a suggestive smile.

"Thanks, no," Jerry returned dryly; "but if you aren't busy, I wish you'd walk along with me. I'm bored—tired—'most to death, and I fancy you might tell me how I may best kill time for the next few days."

The little guide was delighted. He suggested a multitude of things which might be done,—visits to Castellmare and Sorrento or Amalfi; wonders the signor had neglected in the museum; the pasta shops; and so on for a variety of possible and impossible diversions. But still Taberman shook his head. He wanted to be amused, but he was lonely and rather homesick, so that while he regretted being so difficult, nothing appealed to him. Finally, the guide, quite at his wit's end but still bland, smiling, patient, obsequious, and apparently unruffled by the careless way in which the American rejected all his suggestions one after the other, mentioned Pesto.

"Pesto?" queried Tab carelessly. "What is that?"

"Si! Pesto. It ees dere dey hav-a de gret-a temple; t'ree gret-a temple, all put een de row-a,—uno, due, tre." And he held up three fingers to make his statement at once clearer and more emphatic.

"Temples? Real ones?" asked Jerry. "I mean are they old—Roman, that is—or just churches?"

"Ma verament'," laughed the valet de place, "ci son' tre templi; bot-a dey not-a Roman; dey Gre'k. Fin-a, big-a temple; big-a like HÔtel du Vesuve!"

He waved his spread arms as if he would embrace the universe. Jerry laughed at the little man's enthusiasm, but his interest was excited.

"Greek, eh?" he said. "How far is it? How do you get there?"

The guide explained volubly, told the time of trains to PÆstum, declared that the trip was easily made in a day, and proffered his services as escort. This Jerry declined, quite as much from motives of economy as from any other reason; but he invited the little guide to sit down at one of the small tables on the sidewalk before Zinfoni's, where he furnished him with refreshments and made him repeat his account of the temples, the details of the journey, and whatever information he could furnish. Jerry was really lonely enough to be amused by the company of the Neapolitan, and as he sat listening and watching the people drifting past, he was soothed with the feeling of being not so entirely alone. From Zinfoni's the pair sauntered down to the quay, where they parted. The Italian was profuse in his thanks and protestations, and Jerry was considerate enough to act in such a manner as to make the little man think him the most affable of Inglesi.

When he was aboard again, Jerry got out a chart, and after some searching located PÆstum. As it was not too far from Naples to be possible in a day, he determined upon the expedition. Jack was not due for two or three days yet, and the time must be killed somehow. He summoned Gonzague, ordered an early breakfast, told him he should be absent all the next day, and that he should leave him in charge. He had a sort of mild exhilaration at his boldness in thus venturing off into the midst of a land whose language he could not speak, and he went to bed that night with a great feeling of relief. The doldrums were over; he had something to do to bridge the time until Jack came.