Naples, Capri, Vesuvius, Amalfi and Pompeii.

Naples is the largest, dirtiest and most beautiful city in Italy. From the balconies of our hotel, which stands high on the thickly-built hillside, we have a matchless view—the cream-colored city at our feet, with its red roofs and blue domes, rising from the water's edge and climbing the embayed mountain like half of a vast amphitheatre; the volcano of Vesuvius beyond, lifting its white plume of warning smoke by day, and sometimes glaring red at night; the brown ruins of overwhelmed but disentombed Pompeii a little to the right; then the cliffs of Sorrento; and, stretching between us and them, the bay itself, with its incomparable crescent of contiguous cities running like a fringe of snow round its blue waters. There—

The contrast between the heavenly scenery of this bay and that awful volcano, which stands over it like an ever-present threat of destruction, reminds one of the cherubim which stood at the gate of Eden to guarantee the restoration of redeemed and glorified humanity to communion with God, along with the self-revolving sword which symbolized the certainty and terribleness of divine vengeance upon sin. But neither by the promises of his grace nor by the threat of his vengeance do these people seem to be restrained from sin. Many of them are sunk in vice. The contrast between splendor and squalor, superfluous wealth and abject poverty, which characterizes all large cities, is sharper, if possible, here than anywhere else. But it is the latter, the picturesque misery of Naples, that makes most impression upon the visitor. Some of the narrow streets, often not more than ten or twenty feet wide, are indescribably filthy, and they swarm with bareheaded, untidy women and half-naked children, yelling hucksters and pertinacious beggars, dirty monks and gowned priests. All this, and more which cannot here be set down, in one of the loveliest places on this beautiful earth.

An observant and witty friend of mine says: "The people live outdoors, and for the best of reason—they would die indoors.... Into most of the living rooms on their narrowest streets the sun never shines.... At the best, the ordinary buildings feel sepulchral, and an overcoat is to be worn here in the house, and not on the streets! Lining the sides of many, if not most of the streets, are shops or booths. They are, as far as one can see, single rooms, furnished about the door with vegetables, or meats, or maccaroni, or wine bottles, or charcoal, or bread, the rest of the room filled with beds and tables and dressers, with dishes and food, and shrines and highly-colored chromos of the saints and apostles. The children are washed and dressed in the doorways, and their heads constantly watched and investigated, much after the friendly fashion of monkeys. By the way, peddlers are forever thrusting small boxes of combs into our faces, insisting upon our buying. We have not purchased any yet—but who can tell? The people do much of their cooking in small braziers outside the doors, on the sidewalk, burning charcoal and fanning the fires with hats or aprons. They have no hesitancy about eating out of the same dish and in the public eye. Cows and goats are driven along the street and milked at the doors into glasses or bottles, which seems a fair guarantee for the milk being fresh. The calves and kids come to town, too, and take in the ways of the city, along with what they get of their mothers' milk. Women wash clothes at the public fountains, some bringing wash-boards or flat stones, some treading the clothes in tubs with their feet. From windows and balconies, on lines stretched along the streets and on cane poles that almost touch the opposite houses, the wet things drip and dry. Squads of soldiers in various uniforms pass and repass at all times of day; old women knit and rest in the doorways; vegetable and fish venders proclaim their wares in high, hard voices. At their cries baskets are let down from upper windows, and the sharpest bargains in the shrillest accents are driven in midair. If the goods are not satisfactory, down go the baskets to the sidewalk."

Of course we visited the aquarium, said to be the finest in the world, and the museum, with its two thousand mural paintings brought from Pompeii, and its collection of ancient bronzes—also the finest in the world.

But the things that interested us most were not in Naples, but around it—such as Puteoli, where, many centuries ago, on a balmy spring day like this, when the south wind was blowing softly over the sea, the Apostle Paul landed, with Luke and Aristarchus, on his way to Rome; and where the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Serapis, bearing sea-marks at various levels and having its columns perforated by lithodomites and containing imbedded shells, shows how the building, by gradual subsidence of the land, was first let down into the water, and then by volcanic upheaval lifted again to the higher level.

Directly in front of us as we look from our windows, but far out over the expanse of sunlit water, twenty-two miles away, we can see Capri, lying like a turquoise gem on the bosom of the bay. Our party returned from their visit to this enchanting island with quite new conceptions of the color effects that may be produced by the combination of sunlight and sea water. When the steamer stops at Capri, a short distance beyond the town of Capri, the passengers get into small boats and are rowed up to a lofty cliff, in the base of which, at the water level, there is a small hole, four feet high and four feet wide, so small, indeed, that it cannot be entered at all when the tide is up or the water is rough. Even under favorable conditions, passengers have to sit on the bottom of the boat and duck their heads. This is the entrance to the wonderful Blue Grotto. "Once within, you find yourself in an arched cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred and twenty wide, and about seventy high. How deep it is no man knows. It goes down to the bottom of the ocean. The waters of this placid subterranean lake are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined. They are as transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest sky that ever bent over Italy. No tint could be more ravishing, no lustre more superb. Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical fires. Dip an oar, and its blade turns to frosted silver, tinted with blue. Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an armor more gorgeous than ever kingly crusader wore." Two boys, in the scantiest possible attire, who were standing on a ledge when we entered, clothed themselves repeatedly in this celestial armor for our delectation and their profit, by diving for the pennies flung into the water by the passengers.

When you visit Vesuvius, make an early start and give yourself plenty of time. It took our party four hours and a half, with a good team, to drive from Naples to the foot of the steep cone at the top. The journey takes you through some of the disagreeable parts of the city and gives you a new impression of its extent. When at last you do turn from the squalid streets and begin the ascent of the mountain, your enjoyment begins. The fresh breeze, laden with the fragrance of orange blossoms, tempers the heat, and at every turn of the winding, climbing road you have the most entrancing views of the city and the bay. The mountain itself is partly covered with the luxuriant greenery of orchards and villas, and partly by the gloomy beds of lava thrown out by successive eruptions—"a black ocean, which was tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes—a wild chaos of ruin, desolation and barrenness—a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder—of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines, trunks of trees all interlaced and mingled together; and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far stretching waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!—all stricken dead and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!—fettered, paralyzed and left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore!"

I had had the good fortune on a former visit to see the process of its formation. At that time the lava was actually flowing from a breach in the side of the mountain, a little below the cone which surrounds the great crater, and a party of us walked over a half mile or so among the wild rocks and congealed lava to get a sight of it. The rocks over which we walked were too hot to touch with the naked hand, and scorched the bottoms of our shoes. The fumes of sulphur escaping through the crevices made the air almost suffocating. These conditions became more aggravated the nearer we came to the object of our search, so that one or two of the party became quite unnerved, gave up the expedition, and returned. We felt like we were walking in a furnace. Then the guide made a turn round some great boulders, and there it was—a slowly moving stream of liquid fire, issuing from under a great rock, and flowing down the side of the mountain. Every one threw his hands before his face to protect it from the blistering heat. The guide, standing behind a big rock, reached over with a long pole into this fearful red river and lifted out a glob of the molten lava on the end of it, as you would dip up a bit of hot molasses candy on the end of a fork, then, withdrawing a little way, he disengaged the lava from the end of the pole with a smaller stick, and, asking me for a penny, he laid the coin on the lump of lava and pressed it well down into the mass which rose round the edges of the coin, holding it firmly in its place—and thus made for me a paper weight, which is my best souvenir of Vesuvius.

The ascent of the cone to the crater is next thing to trying to climb a church steeple. Thanks to the enterprise of Thomas Cook & Sons, there is an inclined railway which takes you from the foot of the cone up the steep breast of the mountain nearly to the top—a dizzy ride, one that makes you shut your eyes and grip the arms of your seat. Then comes the worst of it—the final climb through warm cinders ankle deep, which furnish very bad footing and come over your shoe tops at every step. There are rude sedan chairs on poles, and chair-bearers who will gladly carry you up for an additional fee—and there are often ludicrous scenes when timid ladies essay this mode of ascent. The distance is very short, so the ladies of our party determined to climb it themselves, but, when about half way up, they were glad enough to take hold of the looped ends of ropes while men at the other end pulled, and so at last they stood on the very top of the great volcano. Not for long, however, for, after they had walked round the edge of the great crater and gotten a view of the new crater, formed within, and looking like the heaped hole of a gigantic "doodle bug," with its slopes made of cinders instead of sand, and sprinkled with orange-colored sulphur, the wind veered suddenly and swept the stifling sulphur fumes right into their faces. They ran, coughing, back over the cinders and down again to the upper station of the railway, fully convinced that Vesuvius, though not perhaps so impressive, was decidedly more pleasant at a distance than at such close range.

Perhaps the most beautiful drive in the world is the drive from Castellamare to Amalfi. Castellamare is about an hour and a half by rail from Naples, and not far from Pompeii. It was here, indeed, that the elder Pliny lost his life in the eruption of 79 A. D., which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. Taking a wagonette there about the middle of the day, we followed this magnificent road nearly all the afternoon, as it wound in and out along the mountainside, with the towering cliffs on one hand and the intensely blue bay on the other, seen ever and anon through openings between the silvery olive trees which clothed all the slopes, the view backwards being terminated by the majestic uplift of Vesuvius, wearing a soft plum-colored tinge that we had never seen it have before. The soil here is wonderfully fertile, and every hillside is terraced and cultivated with the utmost care. The orange and lemon groves, with the trees trained over trellises and protected from too intense heat by straw, laid on frames above, were still blooming, though the trees were heavily laden with green and golden fruit. Every now and then little boys and girls from the villages which are perched on the rocks or cling to the hillsides would run after us, throwing nosegays into the carriage and expecting "soldi" in return. After a while the scenery became more rugged, not unlike Switzerland, with little waterfalls trickling down the cliffs, and Scotch broom and other wild plants taking the place of the vineyards and orchards on the towering rocks. And now we begin to drive through tunnels cut through the cliffs and to pass over solid stone bridges, spanning glorious ravines at a dizzy height, with the transparent sea making in far below us, and the mountains of gray rock towering skyward above us. And at last, in the soft evening light, we reached the culmination of all this wonderful beauty at Amalfi. When we stopped at the foot of the cliff on which the Cappuccini Hotel stands, overlooking the town and the sea, we found the uniformed portiere and other attendants in a little lodge or office at the bottom of a long, zigzag flight of stone steps, which leads up to the high perched hotel. But there were sedan chairs and chair-bearers to spare the ladies and the youngest of the children the long, lung-taxing climb, and we were soon comfortably installed in the most romantically situated hotel I have ever seen. It was a Cappucin monastery once, and the cloisters are still there, but the cells are now used as bed-rooms. From the windows and balconies, and from the long and lovely arcade, covered with grape vines and lined with the most beautiful marguerites, lilies, roses and geraniums, the guests look down upon the picturesque little city, the boats drawn up on the beach, the burnished Mediterranean, and the opaline islands in the offing. And how we Protestants did sleep in the comfortably furnished cells of those ousted monks! Amalfi is the place I wish to come to if I am ever again in Italy.

When we tore ourselves away from Amalfi, we drove on around by Salerno, another feast of beauty, and took the train at La Cava for Pompeii. For days we had been reading, or re-reading, Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii with breathless interest, or plodding through the dryer, but hardly more accurate, details of the guide book—we had been to the museum at Naples, where the mural paintings and other disentombed relics of the city are shown, and we had stood on the crater of the volcano that wrought its destruction—so that we came to the exhumed ruins with as thorough preparation as we had found it possible to make. But what description can prepare one for the impression of that appalling catastrophe which one receives when he stands in the midst of the ruins themselves, and sees how sudden and terrible the overthrow was?

Pompeii had been shattered by an earthquake sixteen years before the final catastrophe, but the warning had been disregarded. The place was rebuilt with lavish outlay, and embellished with all the resources of contemporary art, so that it was a new and splendid city which was buried by the eruption of 79 A. D. On the 23rd of August in that year, about two o'clock in the afternoon, terrible detonations were heard in the mountain, and shortly afterwards an enormous column of watery vapor issued from the top of it, remained suspended for a time in the air, then condensed and fell in boiling rain on the mountain sides, creating an irresistible torrent of mud, which quickly engulfed the city of Herculaneum. Following this, later in the evening, apparently about dark, came a roaring eruption of red hot pumice stones and volcanic dust, succeeded quickly by other showers of the same material, which covered Pompeii to the depth of fifteen or twenty feet. Thus was the brilliant city, in all the exuberance of its gay life, plunged into death in a single night. And all the inhabitants of that part of Italy believed that they were about to share the same dreadful fate. The air was so thick that for many miles from the volcano it was almost stifling. It is said to have extended as far as Africa. It certainly reached as far as Rome, and covered that city with a pall of darkness so deep that the people took it for a sign of impending doom. They said to each other, "The end of the world is come! the sun is going to fall to the earth, or the earth mount up and be set on fire by the heavens."

The most graphic account of the horrors of that awful night at Pompeii is to be found in the two letters of the younger Pliny to Tacitus. Speaking of his efforts to remove his mother out of reach of harm, while she was begging him to leave her to perish and save himself, he says: "By this time the murky darkness had so increased that one might have believed himself abroad in a black and moonless night, or in a chamber where all the lights had been extinguished. On every hand were heard the complaints of women, the wailing of children, and the cries of men. One called his father, another his son, another his wife, and only by their voices could they know each other. Many in their despair begged that death would come and end their distress. Some implored the gods to succor them, and some believed that this night was the last, the eternal night which should engulf the universe! Even so it seemed to me—and I consoled myself for the coming death with the reflection, Behold the world is passing away!"

No one saw the sun rise on the morrow. The clouds of volcanic matter, still pouring their pitiless rain upon the ruins, so darkened the sky that people could not tell when the day came.

And there, under the superincumbent mass of stones and dust, the city slept undisturbed till a few years ago, with everything as it was in the days of Titus. "It was like a clock that stopped when the householder died. Meats were on the table and bread was in the oven; sentries were in their boxes and dogs on guard at house doors." Most of the inhabitants escaped, but it is estimated, from the skeletons found in the ruins, that not less than two thousand lost their lives. In the museum by the entrance at the Marine Gate we are shown the blackened loaves of bread, recovered from the bakeries, the beans and eggs, the chickens and dogs, or their shapes from the moulds they left—and, most distressing of all, human figures. "Plaster of Paris had been poured into the hollows where bones were found, and in all the contortion of suffocation or convulsion appeared the forms of men and women. How little the ones whose brawny or whose delicate outlines we gazed upon dreamt that they would be their own monuments to-day, and be seen by the eyes of other races and ages, eyes curious, but not unsympathetic! It was good to be in the warm sunshine again. A cloud of smoke floated like a gray scarf—how gracefully and innocently!—from Vesuvius."

We walked up the narrow streets, paved with blocks of hard lava, deeply rutted by chariot wheels, passing the Basilica, the Forum, the Triumphal Arch, the temples, the theatres, the baths, the bakeries, and the houses of Pansa, Diomedes, and the Tragic Poet—all laid bare and clean to the view. We had the good fortune to see the process of excavation itself—for while most of the city has been disentombed, some of it still remains under the layers of small grayish white pumice stones and brown dust. Three or four men were shovelling these away as we passed. From most of the houses the furniture and wall paintings have been taken away to the museums. But in the last large residence exhumed, one which has only recently been brought to light, nearly everything has been left as it was, except for a new roof of mica or some such substance, which has been built over it for its protection. Nearly all the frescoes are as fresh as on the day when they were painted, and the fountain in the peristyle and its connecting pipes are so perfectly preserved that, when the water was turned into them by the excavators, the fountains began to play as they did on that fateful day eighteen hundred years ago. "For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away," so it was with the careless dwellers in this opulent city—and so it is with the careless dwellers in many an opulent city to-day.

From Naples we turned our faces homeward, taking passage on the KÖnig Albert, and coming by way of Gibraltar and the Azores. We had a delightful ship's company, including Dr. Andrew D. White, the accomplished ex-president of Cornell University and our late Ambassador to Berlin, whom we found full of illuminating talk about Fra Paolo Sarpi and other great men and great subjects. After a quiet and restful voyage, affording a pleasant contrast with our experience of the preceding summer when outward bound, we arrived at New York on the 10th of June, 1903, deeply thankful for all the pleasure and benefit the year had brought us, and fully convinced that, after all, ours is the best country in the world.

INDEX.