Naples! What marvellous scenes that one word conjures up! Everybody knows Naples. Those who have not seen it have read about it, and its thousand marvels are familiar as household words. Vesuvius is known to every street arab who sells matches in the street. The story of Pompeii is as the story of Noah’s Ark. And Naples itself! Are not Neapolitan ices sold from barrows at a halfpenny each wherever the English language is spoken—from Hampstead Heath to Donnybrook Fair? The Neapolitan fisherman, in his red cap, who sings choruses from ‘Masaniello'; the little Neapolitan girl who sings ‘Santa Lucia'; the lazzaroni, the Bay, the Chiaja, the house of Emma Lady Hamilton, the grottoes, the blood of St. Gennarius, the storytellers on the Port, the puppets, the poor horses with open wounds—all these things are now as A B C to Englishmen; and there is not a boy or girl in the fourth standard who couldn’t tell you that ‘Vedi Napoli e poi mori’ means ‘See Naples and then die.’

Shall I confess that, having been taught from my earliest infancy to believe in the Naples of romance, the Naples of the operatic stage, the Naples of the guide-book, and the Naples of the tourist, I was just a little disappointed when I first found myself in the famous city? My first disappointment was the complete absence of choruses of red-bonneted fishermen, singing, ‘Behold, how brightly breaks the morning.’ My second disappointment was the utter absence of colour and costume on the quay and in the city; and my greatest disappointment of all was that the bay was not blue, the sun was not warm, and the people were not gay. I arrived in Naples on a day which must have left London last November, and have remained hidden somewhere off the coast until it heard of my arrival. It was a dark, dull, lowering day—a day such as my good friend the oldest inhabitant could not remember the like of. Vesuvius in the background was shooting up a black volume of smoke that made him look like Sheffield in the distance more than the time-honoured mountain of the London matchbox, and the sky was as dirty and grimy as the lava pavement of the city. It wasn’t the fault of Naples that it so belied its character. It was my fault. I had brought my own weather with me, and spoiled Naples as I had spoiled the Riviera.

But in the morning all was changed. The sky was a cloudless blue, and the sun shone brilliantly, and I sallied forth to lounge away the day, and to steep myself in Neapolitan life. Much of my first disappointment was atoned for, but still I searched in vain for picturesque costume. Naples is no longer the Naples of old. The curse of the billycock hat, which has spread over Europe, has not spared Southern Italy. The common people wear the castoff clothes of the well-to-do, and the well-to-do dress in the London fashion. As a natural consequence, the Neapolitan porters and fishermen and lazzaroni have little to distinguish them from the London labourer and the London costermonger. Naples has also in a great measure been ruined by the rich foreigner, who insists on carrying his own manners and customs with him. The old habits of the people yield to foreign influence, and one great city becomes as another great city. The English and the French and the Germans come to spend their money at Naples. They must be pleased. To please them everything that is English and French and German is introduced, and one by one the Neapolitan characteristics disappear.

Still, the industrious searcher who leaves the beaten track of the visitor and plunges into the side streets and the poorer quarters can find plenty of reward for his pains. He who would see Neapolitan life and study the people, their amusements and their customs, must shun the great hotels, and turn a deaf ear to the words of porters and hotel guides. As a rule the hotel people know nothing of the town. As an instance, take the hotel at which I stayed. The proprietor was a Swiss; the hall-porter was a German newly arrived from the Midland Hotel, St. Pancras; the head waiter was, during last season, sitting-room waiter at the Old Ship at Brighton. My sitting-room waiter came from the Queen’s Hotel, Hastings, and my chambermaid’s last place was the Schweizerhof at Lucerne. You can imagine for yourself what these people are likely to know of Naples. I had not been two days in Naples before I was able to tell the hall-porter of a dozen places which would be most interesting to English visitors, but of which he had never heard. Yet every day I heard English tourists inquiring of this man what they ought to see, and he gave them the stereotyped answer. He sent them to Pompeii, Vesuvius, and one or two well-known places, and for their evening’s amusement invariably recommended them to try the opera at San Carlo. San Carlo is the largest theatre in Europe, and the opera is magnificently given there; but there are a score of things to see in Naples of an evening which are far more amusing and instructive and novel than a night at the opera.

One such place I found for myself, and I will tell you what I saw there presently, but first I must get over my ascent of Vesuvius. It is an awful journey from Naples to the edge of the crater, but the adventurous voyager is well repaid for all his trouble, especially if he is as fortunate as I was on the day of my visit. Vesuvius is a great fact in the history of Naples; but for Vesuvius there would be no Herculaneum and no Pompeii, and Vesuvius has had a tremendous influence on the Neapolitan character. People who live at the foot of a volcano, within sight of buried cities and islands and mountains which disappear in a single night and reappear again, sometimes after thirty years of submergence, are naturally superstitious, and equally naturally strongly pervaded with the sentiments of religion.

Nowhere are the people so devout as in these parts. Shrines are everywhere, and no house is without its cross. The priests flourish in the midst of the people, and are beloved and revered by them. New ideas come slowly to minds filled with simple and childlike faith, and free thought makes but slow progress among a populace who are ever in the presence of Nature’s most sudden and most awful catastrophes. Grant that the Neapolitan is bigoted, superstitious, incapable of great mental or physical effort. Who can wonder at it? Climate, race, and surrounding circumstances account for it all! Live in Naples and be energetic under that clear blue sky, in that hot sun, in that dreamy atmosphere, if you can. Live under the shadow of that ever-seething volcano, knowing not at what moment it may pour forth its fiery deluge and bury the villages for miles around under a molten mass, and scoff if you dare!

All my life long I had wanted to see Vesuvius. My youthful imagination was fired by the picture on the fusee boxes. It was not until the month of January, 1888, that I found myself at last within measurable distance of the grand old volcano.

I was in Naples for some days before I made the excursion. Every morning I used to gaze at the great mountain celebrity, and from the respectful distance of my bedroom window at the Grand Hotel watch him ‘smoking his morning pipe'; but Vesuvius, as seen from Naples, is a very different affair from Vesuvius as seen from the mouth of its crater. I was a long time making up my mind to ‘do’ Vesuvius, because Naples is a place where one does not go to bed particularly early. Every evening found me at one of the theatres, generally the magnificent San Carlo, and as the opera in Naples is frequently not over until past midnight, and there is life to be seen at the CafÉ de l’Europe, in the Via Nazionale, ‘after the opera is over,’ it was often two o’clock in the morning ere I walked back along the lonely Chiaja to the Grand Hotel. Now, to see Vesuvius properly, and get back to Naples before nightfall, it is necessary that you should make a start at eight o’clock in the morning. Naples is the last place in the world in which a man wants to get up early in the morning—Naples is the home of the dolce far niente. Mendelssohn declared that in Naples he felt the greatest disinclination to do anything at all. ‘I lounged about the streets all day,’ he says, ‘with a morose face, and would have preferred lying on the ground without the trouble of thinking, or writing, or doing anything. The atmosphere of Naples is suitable to grandees who rise late, never require to go out on foot, never think (for this is heating), sleep away a couple of hours on a sofa in the afternoon, then eat ice and drive to the theatre at night, where again they do not find anything to think about, but simply make and receive visits.’ This peculiarity of ‘Neapolitans at the play’ I may refer to on another occasion, when I write my long-contemplated article on the theatres of Europe; for the present I only wish to draw attention to the intense laziness which the climate engenders. You will now understand why I remained in Naples a whole week before I summoned up sufficient courage to get up at eight o’clock in the morning to go to Vesuvius.

However, I managed it at last. This is how I got up at eight o’clock in the morning: I returned from the theatre at one in the morning, sat up in my room with my companion, the now famous Albert Edward, native of Finland and citizen of the world, smoking and talking till three. Then we settled ourselves down in easy-chairs and went to sleep without undressing. At seven we were aroused by the waiter, who, according to overnight instructions, entered with considerable noise and some hot coffee, and after giving us half an hour’s grace took us by the shoulders and forced us downstairs.

Even when we stood outside the hotel, and found it cold, we said we would go back and go to bed; but the landlord, who had promised us faithfully to prevent any weakness on our part at the last moment, was a man of his word, and, assisted by the waiter and the porter, thrust us into the carriage, banged the door, and bade the coachman drive off with us at once to Vesuvius.

Finding that further subterfuge was impossible, we turned up our coat-collars, wrapped ourselves in our rugs, and presently we fell fast asleep, the rhythmic snoring of my companion alone breaking the silence of the lonely roads along which, at a cruel crawl, our wretched animals proceeded.

Oh, the poor horses of Naples! They have haunted me ever since I saw them. There is not, I should think, any place in the civilized world where dumb beasts are treated with such wanton brutality as in this glorious Naples. Some of the horses are mere skeletons—bags of bones—and their starved bodies all one mass of gaping wounds and hideous sores. The Neapolitan flyman always keeps a wound or a sore place open on his horse’s body. It is into this wound that he thrusts a sharp-pointed stick when he wants to urge the poor beast to further effort or increased speed. I have seen a poor little pony, one mass of sores and dead lame, dragging a calesso containing fourteen people, and being goaded into a gallop the whole length of a journey of ten miles.

I have referred to the subject of the Naples horses elsewhere, but it cannot be referred to too often. I am, in common with many other writers who have seen the awful cruelty of Naples, hopeful that some day public opinion will grow so strong on the subject that even the Neapolitans will be shamed into something like ordinary humanity to their dumb slaves.

Let me briefly, while our own wretched animals drag us wearily along the road to Vesuvius (it takes four hours to get to the base of the cone from Naples), tell you something of the Naples beasts of burthen.

The calesso which I mentioned above is a long, narrow cart with three benches or seats in it, and two poles sticking out behind, on which a board is placed which seats more people. These calessi belong mostly to the villagers and the costermongers. The sides are painted sometimes with pictures of the Virgin, sometimes with ballet ladies, and sometimes with apocryphal figures. But however much they differ on the outside they are always the same inside—that is, they are always full. The proprietor of a calesso drives half the village to town and back again for nothing if they are his friends; for a small fee if they are not. All the morning you see these loaded calessi coming into Naples, and all the afternoon you meet them going out again. Sometimes, instead of the usual lame, raw, starved pony, a donkey draws the terrible load; occasionally a horse in the last stage of break up and break down is harnessed to the shafts. The heavier waggons are drawn by teams. Sometimes four horses, sometimes a horse and a donkey, are harnessed together. Sometimes a horse, a donkey, and a cow limp along side by side. Upon one occasion near Pozzuoli I met a horse, a cow, a mule, and a donkey drawing a load, but the most frequent ‘pair’ is a horse and a cow.

Up in a secluded corner near the tomb of Virgil, just at the entrance to the old grotto of Posilipo, I came one day on a dirty, broken-down looking stable. On the door I saw written up ‘Society for the Protection of Animals.’ After seeing the animals, I was not surprised that the society took such a back seat. After all, what can it do in a country where everybody tells you it is wicked to think of animals—animals have no souls! Well, it may be so. I am far from sure about it, but animals have hearts, and in this respect they have the advantage of the people who torture them so cruelly in return for their willing, life-long drudgery.

We arrived at the foot of the cone at last. The last part of the journey had been a zigzag climb over miles of lava and black mud and shapeless rocks, the cooled down ‘vomit of Vesuvius.’

At the foot of the cone is a funicular railway which has been rendered familiar by the advertisements on most of the Continental railway-stations.

The price of a seat in one of the cars is £1. We step in, and are hauled up to the top.

It is something like going up the side of a house on a switchback, and the process is so alarming that many people still prefer the old-fashioned method of ascension, and either climb up laboriously or are carried up in chairs by the guides and porters.

I had an uncomfortable feeling that the rope might break as I made the ascent, and I was intensely relieved when we reached the mountain station and stood once more on terra firma.

But there is still a further ascent to make on foot to reach the actual mouth of the crater and look down into the yawning hell that night and day, for ever and ever, is belching forth flame and smoke, and hurling large stones and masses of rock into the air with a report that can only be compared to the discharge of artillery.

As we alight from the funicular, we find ourselves in an awful atmosphere. We are nearly choked with the noxious fumes of the volcano, and our eyes are stung and blinded with the sulphurous smoke that envelops us. The earth trembles beneath our feet, the huge mountain throbs and gasps from beneath, and thick as hail around falls the shower of stones that the volcano, with a thunderous roar, hurls unceasingly into the air.

Still we determine to go on. I have sworn to look into the fiery jaws of Vesuvius, and I will. Slowly we climb up that ‘awful’ summit—a summit seething and boiling and steaming at every pore. Only those who have made the ascent can realize the awful grandeur of the scene which awaits the intrepid excursionist.

I use the word ‘awful’ advisedly. The stoutest heart will quake at the spectacle which he beholds for the first time, and the surroundings are not calculated to diminish the feelings of terror.

During the week I made my ascent a rumour had been published to the effect that an Englishman who made the ascent of Vesuvius without a guide had been lost. It is quite possible to be lost on the summit of Vesuvius. Enveloped in smoke and steam, you may easily, if you are incautious, become asphyxiated and fall into the crater of the raging volcano, never to be heard of again.

The Englishman turns out to have been a German, and he has probably turned up again at his hotel safe and sound, but there was plenty of justification for the anxiety of his friends.

We take a guide. My companion was on the mountain during one eruption and had to fly for his life. While we are ascending he tells me the story, and that does not add to my sense of security.

It was the greatest eruption that had occurred during the present century, and took place on April 24, 1872. At 4 p.m. a new crater opened on the side of the mountain, and the lava from it made a circular sweep round the mountain, threatening to cut off the descent of all the people who were up above.

My companion, alarmed by the shouts of the guides, guessed something had happened, and made all haste to descend, and only got down just in time to find a narrow passage still open, through which he dashed.

By the time he reached the Hermitage the entire side of the mountain was a sheet of burning lava. He learned afterwards that forty people had perished on the volcano. The lava overwhelmed two villages—Massa and San Sebastiano—and at Resina, the village at the foot, nearly a hundred people were destroyed.

I had joked on the road about an eruption and what a fine thing it would be to write about; but standing within measurable distance of the seat of danger I am not only willing but decidedly anxious to postpone the experiment.

Our guide conducts us cautiously over the yellow masses of sulphurous rock and the yawning, steaming fissures, and the huge masses of coiled lava that look like twisted rope. Our feet are parboiled with the steam that rises from beneath them. The perspiration begins to burst from every pore. We are in a perfect Turkish bath, or, rather, imperfect one, in which the noxious fumes and vapours are allowed to escape and choke the patient.

We cough and sneeze, and I gasp out a prophecy that I shall be choked. My eyes smart as they have never smarted in the foulest London fog.

‘Close your mouths!’ yells our guide. We close our mouths and make frantic efforts not to inhale the awful fumes of Vesuvius through our nostrils, and still we stagger on with trembling limbs and anxious faces, and at last we stand on the edge of the crater and peer down into the abyss below.

The sight is terrible, and yet sublime in its grandeur.

Even as we look, blinded and choked, there is a loud report, and hundreds of large stones are hurled high in the air.

The ground rocks beneath us. There is another report, and another, and this time huge masses of rock are flung aloft from the infernal depths of the crater.

I am fascinated by the scene, though I am in a state of mortal terror. My companion urges me to come away. He has had enough of it, and is thinking of the day when he had to fly for his life. No one who has ever seen the burning lava pour down the sides of Vesuvius, and has been in its path, ever wants to behold the sight again.

I, too, am thinking, but my thoughts have flown farther back than my friend’s. I am thinking of all the scenes of horror and death and desolation of which this stupendous volcano has been the cause. I think of the buried cities that lie around me, hidden for ever beneath the deadly vomit of the mouth into whose insatiable jaws I stand and gaze.

Herculaneum and Pompeii are below me, and hundreds of villages have been swallowed up in the bygone centuries, and have left no record on the pages of history.

I don’t know how long I should have remained gazing down into the jaws of the volcano, terrified, yet too fascinated to move, had I not felt symptoms of dizziness coming over me.

Not wishing to share the fate of the gentleman named Empedocles, who in the year 400 B.C. toppled over into the crater of Mount Etna, I made a violent effort and stepped slowly backward from the mouth of the crater, and gradually staggered over the rough rocks and piles of lava until, steaming and caked with sulphur, I returned to the little restaurant which has been obligingly built by the authorities at the foot of the cone.

Here I sat down to rest my weary limbs and recover my dazed senses. We had a bottle of Vesuvio—a wine made from the grapes which grow on the southern slopes of the mountain—and then we made our way to the world-famous observatory on the side of the mountain, over which Professor Palmieri presides, and which contains a marvellous instrument called a seismograph.

Professor Palmieri has made Vesuvius the study of his life. By the aid of his instrument he is able now to know twenty-four hours in advance whether the intentions of the mountain are honourable or not.

By the kindness of the aged professor I was enabled to examine the seismograph at my leisure, and I will briefly explain what it is.

It is a marvellous piece of mechanism, so arranged that certain wires are agitated every time Vesuvius breathes. It is a long way from the crater—in fact, it is actually on a neighbouring spur, but so perfectly is it arranged that every movement of the volcano is recorded. While I watched it the wires trembled—Vesuvius had thrown up a few stones. So delicate is the mechanism that if you put your wrist within the glass case which contains it your pulsation causes the wires to be agitated.

In the night, when the ‘observers’ sleep, the seismograph still records the force of every breath the volcano draws. Attached to spiral wires are a red pencil and a blue pencil, and underneath the points of these a piece of tape—such as is used in telegraphing—winds itself round a reel. Any force or agitation in the centre of the crater brings the pencils down upon the tape, and causes them to mark it. A spasm of one kind causes the red pencil to mark the tape, a spasm of another kind sets the blue pencil off. In the morning the member of the staff on duty simply looks at the tape, and he can tell exactly what ‘Old ‘Suvy’ has been up to in the night. This is only a rough outline of what this wonderful instrument of Professor Palmieri’s can accomplish. To understand it thoroughly you must see it yourself.

After we had spent a pleasant hour in the observatory, chatting with one of the attendants, who, by-the-bye, was formerly in the chorus of the Royal Italian Opera in London, we went down the mountain to the inn at which our horses had been stabled, and as soon as our coachman was ready we drove back again to Naples.

I was tired out and fell asleep, only waking up once, just in time to listen to a pious pifferari, who was making music at midnight before the shrine of the Madonna.

I had a day’s rest after doing Vesuvius, and then I set out for Pompeii. You can go by rail, so I didn’t this time have to rise at an abnormally early hour. The train that left Naples for Pompeii might have been a special from the Tower of Babel. Certainly every European language was represented in it. When I arrived at Pompeii I was hungry, and I adjourned at once to a restaurant, where a table d’hÔte breakfast was being served in every language under the European sun. At the little table at which I managed to find a seat we were English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Roumanian, Russian, Pole, and Swede, and the other Continents were represented by a couple of Australians and three Americans. But it is an extraordinary thing that, when we conversed together in scraps of our various languages, we found we were all making the same joke about the food. The omelette was made with eggs discovered in Pompeii, which had been laid eighteen hundred years ago. The beef was from a cow which had been dug up petrified during the latest excavation; the apples had been found in the house of Diomed, where Diomed had left them when he fled from the rain of hot ashes that fell upon his doomed villa on November 24, 79. We all laughed at the joke, and the waiter—a polyglot personage, who talked fourteen languages all mixed up together at the same time—laughed too, and told us that it was on record that ever since there had been a restaurant in Pompeii every traveller who refreshed at it had perpetrated that very identical joke. And then he looked very hard at me, and said: ‘But, pardon, sir; do I know you? Is it not that you are Mr. ——?’ ‘You have guessed it the first time,’ I replied, putting the idiom into German as well as I could on the spur of the moment; ‘but where have you known me?’ ‘Ah, you no remember John! I am John, as was your waiter in sitting-room at the London North-Western Hotel at Liverpool.’ Oh, these jack-in-the-box sons of the Fatherland! They pursue me everywhere. Fancy meeting your Liverpool German waiter at Pompeii!

Of Pompeii itself what can I say in these pages? I want a whole book to write what I think about it, and then I shall only have said what hundreds have said before me. To wander about that old-world town, rescued from its ashes after centuries of oblivion, is to stand aghast with astonishment at the little progress which civilization has made with the centuries. The Pompeians had probably forgotten far more than we shall ever know. One stands absolutely open-mouthed and with starting eyeballs before the cases in the museum, which contain the Pompeian lady’s rouge-pot, and the Pompeian doctor’s surgical instruments, and the pass-out checks for the Pompeian theatre; and the hair of one’s head stands erect as one comes to a wall in Pompeii, and reads what a rude little Pompeian boy had chalked upon it just seventy-nine years after the birth of our Saviour. They knew how to live and how to enjoy themselves, did those old Pompeians, and the art of making the house beautiful was far more theirs than ours. Beautiful and perfect as works of art as are the relics of that past civilization already recovered, it is almost certain that buried deep down in old Herculaneum are works of far greater beauty and of still higher art. But new towns have risen above the old ruins, and the treasure will now probably never be recovered.

The museum at Pompeii suffers from the best things found in the city having been sent to the Naples Museum. In the Pompeii collection, after the dead Pompeians in glass cases, there is very little to see, but they are wonderful enough to satisfy the greatest curiosity hunter. It gives one a little flutter of excitement to look at a man, perfect in form and feature, lying just as he died on that terrible November day in 79—to see his hands clenched and his teeth set, and the very look of horror on his face that came there as he fell, fleeing from the doomed city—fell to rise no more. And in another case lies a beautiful girl of Pompeii, who died with her arm across her eyes, shutting out the sight of the swift death that was overtaking her. And near her lies a poor little dog who died that day. He still wears the collar and chain that bound him to his kennel and prevented his escape. The poor little Pompeian bow-wow, who lived one thousand eight hundred years ago, lies upon his side, his limbs drawn together in agony, his lips parted just as they were when they gave the last dying whimper of terror and despair. Poor little dog! He will be handed down perhaps for thousands of years yet to come, for the wondering eyes of a new race of human beings to gaze upon. That little dog of A.D. 79 may—— But I mustn’t lose myself in building up a Rider Haggard romance about that dog. He has achieved immortality, and, like a good many four-footed immortals, he paid a good price for the advertisement.

In the Naples Museum the rescued statuary and bronzes and ornaments are very wonderful; but what interested me much more was the bread taken out of the oven where it was recently found. It was put in on the day of the catastrophe, and taken out some years ago. It was new bread then; it is absolutely the stalest bread in existence now, for it is 1,800 years old. After the loaves of bread such minor curiosities as the dessert from a nobleman’s table, a bottle of wine from the cellar of Pliny, and a patent latchkey found in a Pompeian gentleman’s pocket, fail to attract more than passing attention. My only astonishment was that nowhere in the museum could I find any traces of the electric light of Pompeii, and that among the rescued literature exhibited there was not a single copy of the Pompeian daily sporting paper. But when I asked the custodian for these things he took a noble revenge by showing me a challenge from the Jem Smith of Pompeii to fight the Jake Kilrain of another town, and the score of a Pompeian tosspot which had been chalked up behind a tavern door. After this he would be a bold man to deny that people were quite as advanced in their civilization in 79 as they are to-day.

All around Naples there are wonderful ruins and natural curiosities, and, of course, I explored them all. I went to the great sulphur mine of Pozzuoli and sulphured myself, and I went all over the Temple of Serapis in the same place, and thoroughly explored the great amphitheatre in which the famous seafights or Naumachia were held by the Romans. The centre of the amphitheatre was filled with water, and then hundreds of slaves and prisoners rowed in and hacked each other to pieces. It was while exploring the dungeons underground in which the prisoners were kept that a terrible adventure befell us. Our guide was a local old gentleman of about ninety—the real genuine oldest inhabitant in the flesh. He carried a tow torch to light us through the damp, noisome, winding passages that led to the cells below the earth, and just as we got into the darkest dungeon the old gentleman fell down in a fit and his torch went out.

The situation was awful. We had not the slightest idea where we were, and we hadn’t any matches with us. We shouted aloud, but only the mocking echo of our own voices answered us. Just as the old gentleman fell he had told us that we were now in dungeons from which no sound could escape. We groped about in the dark, and tried to find a passage, but only with the result that I found myself in one dark dungeon and Albert Edward got into another, and we could neither of us find our way back to the old gentleman. We gave ourselves up for lost. We had not even the hope which the ancient prisoners had of being dragged out into the arena to make a fight of it. We should perish by inches in the secret dungeons of the great Roman amphitheatre of Pozzuoli. Just as we had abandoned hope, and I was trying to scratch a last message to the world on the wall with the point of my scarf-pin, a distant murmur reached our ears. It grew nearer and nearer. We shouted; on it came. We heard English words spoken by English lips. A guide was bringing another party to the secret dungeons. They entered and found us, and between us we carried the epileptic old gentleman upstairs into the light of day, and got him some cold water and brought him round. But I registered a vow never again to visit dungeons with an elderly gentleman subject to fits, and with a tow torch of limited powers of endurance.

In Naples my principal amusement was buying lottery tickets and going to the theatre. I didn’t get much out of the lottery, but I was vastly amused at the theatre, as I sought out the smaller houses where plays in the Neapolitan dialect, with Pulcinella as the principal comedian, were given. One evening’s entertainment was unique in my experience, and will remain impressed upon my mind while memory maintains a sitting position. I had heard much of the marionettes and puppet-shows, and so one evening I found my way to the Teatro Mercadante, where marionettes were announced to appear in a grand play, entitled ‘The Universal Deluge,’ and in the great ballet of ‘Excelsior.’

I fancied, of course, that I was going to a small puppet-show. Imagine my astonishment when I arrived at a real theatre with a real box office, and found that the prices of admission ranged from one lira (equal to a franc) to twenty lire. I paid ten lire for a private box, and on entering the theatre found a huge audience assembled—an audience not of children, but of grown men and women, of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen armed with fans and opera-glasses—just the same kind of audience, in fact, that assembles at the Lyceum, or the Criterion, or the Gaiety. There was an orchestra, too, of twenty performers, and programmes were sold, and when the curtain rose on ‘The Universal Deluge,’ the great grown-up audience settled itself down to enjoy the tragedy enacted by wooden dolls.

When I saw the scene, and Noah and his sons and daughters and the priests came on and conversed, and raised their arms to heaven, and generally conducted themselves in a manner worthy of Sir Henry Irving’s company in ‘Hamlet’ or ‘King Lear,’ I was speechless with surprise. The talking is, of course, done at the wings, but the gestures of the puppets were perfect. There was a little lack of dignity occasionally in the walk off, because the feet sometimes did not quite touch the ground, but the figures being made to appear life-size by the dwarfing and arrangement of the scenery, the illusion was at times simply marvellous. Noah embraced his children; he fell on his knees and raised his hands to heaven; he denounced the wicked, and he gave off long and impressive speeches with such perfect dignity and appropriateness of gesture that he speedily established himself as a great actor in the eyes of the audience. He made his points amid rounds of applause, and at the end of a really magnificent piece of acting he got such a terrific recall that he came on and bowed his acknowledgments. Never did well-trained actor take a call so gracefully as this wooden puppet, and never did trained actor more thoroughly carry his audience away.

The second scene was the day of the Deluge. The skies were stormy and ominous; peals of thunder were heard. Noah made one final appeal to the wicked crowd of dolls, who only mocked him and went off to continue their evil ways. Then Noah knelt down, and, joining his hands, indulged in a short prayer, after which he opened the ark doors, and his sons and daughters, each embracing him, passed in. Then he had a grand exit speech, and walked up the plank into the ark, turning at the door with true stage instinct to give off his exit speech. Then, the human beings having taken their places, the animals commenced to arrive two by two. The animals were wonderful wooden imitations of the real thing, and they walked and pricked their ears and wagged their tails, each species stopping just at the ark door to roar, or to bark, or to neigh, or to crow, or hee-haw, as the case might be. The two donkeys displayed great courage on the eve of such a catastrophe, for they kicked up their heels and relieved the scene with considerable low comedy, retiring at last amid roars of laughter and rounds of applause. Then the serpents wriggled up, and then came the birds. Unfortunately a number of the birds were real ones, and some of them flew into the theatre instead of into the ark. Instantly the huge audience, with true Neapolitan cruelty, set up a yell, and stretched out their hands to capture the frightened little things, and the gallery boys hurled their caps at them, and the crowded house rose and hooted and shouted, and was only satisfied when the poor birds had been caught and killed. After all the animals were in the ark, the door was closed; then a terrible rain descended on the earth—the best rain I have ever seen on the stage. It was so real that I found myself picking up my umbrella in my private box. Now the waters rose rapidly, the ark began to pitch and toss, the wild lightnings flashed, and the audience was hushed to a silence that might be felt. In a moment the wicked were seen climbing to the mountain summits, only to be washed off and carried away. Mothers clung to their children, husbands clutched madly at their drowning wives, and the angry billows were thick with struggling human beings—I beg pardon, struggling with puppets. How all these figures were worked so naturally is a puzzle to me. The action was never jerky or mechanical; it was natural—so natural that the scene became painful. One poor doll mother held her doll baby in her arms and smothered it with kisses as the cruel wave swept them away, and a doll husband perished in agony locked in his young doll wife’s embrace. But safely, amid all the horrors and the cries of the doomed, the brave old ark rode the angry waters, until the dove flew out, and presently returned with an olive-branch. Then the waves were still, day dawned over the scene, and Noah, with the limelight full upon his patriarchal head, knelt at the ark door and returned thanks to Heaven for its mercy to him and his, and then the band played soft, sweet music, and the curtain slowly fell upon ‘The Universal Deluge.’

If this was wonderful, what can I say of the ballet of ‘Excelsior’ which followed? I have seen this famous ballet at San Carlo in Naples, at the Eden in Paris, and at Her Majesty’s in London, but I have never seen it performed with such vigour as by the wooden troop of artists engaged at the Mercadante. The complete ballet was given, with the music, the scenery, the dances, and the various tableaux. The corps de ballet went through the complicated figures with a precision that would have gladdened the heart of Monsieur Jacobi at the Alhambra, and the leading lady, Miss Emma Wood, as she was playfully called in the playbill, won all hearts by the grace and finish of her dancing. She leapt a little higher perhaps than Palladino or Pitteri ever did, and now and then she didn’t trouble to touch the boards with her twinkling little feet; but here, as in the tragedy, the action was excellent, and when, after a magnificent pas seul, Miss Wood was called, she came on and bowed right and left with the most exquisite grace. The dramatic scenes of the ballet were perfectly played, and from start to finish it was thoroughly appreciated by the audience, who remained in the theatre from eight until nearly midnight, applauding and enjoying the really artistic performance of these wooden actors and actresses. When the curtain had descended and we all filed out into the street, it seemed to me that I had at last discovered the secret of true happiness for a dramatic author. It was to live in a country where his plays could be interpreted by puppets. And oh, what a paradise such a land must be to the theatrical manager! No quarrels among the company, no trouble with the leading man, no indisposition of the leading lady, and no salaries to pay, except those of the voices at the wings and the men who work the strings of the puppets from the flies.

From that night I went only to puppet shows. Even a grand opera at San Carlo could not tempt me away from them. I saw dramas and comedies and farcical comedies played by dolls, and I saw everywhere packed audiences roaring with delight at their antics, or weeping in sympathy with their sorrows.

Funerals at Naples are among the curious spectacles of the town. Being of a cheerful disposition, I always run after a funeral. The body is carried on a bier by four masked men, and a procession of masked men follows. These masked men are the Brethren of the Misericordia. Rich funerals have a grand open hearse in which the coffin is placed, and two priests, with lighted candles, sit inside at the head of the coffin. The coffin is always smothered in flowers.

The practice of exposing the dead to the public view still obtains in Naples. Recently, in one of the small streets, a baker lost his only daughter, a very beautiful girl of sixteen. I saw her after she was dead, because the baker had cleared all the bread from his shop-window and put his pretty dead daughter there instead. And for a whole day she lay there, surrounded with beautiful white camellias and lovely flowers, until it was time for her to be placed on the bier and carried off to the Campo Santo.

The lottery playing in Naples is the curse of the town. Almost every second shop is a lottery shop, and all ranks gamble from week to week. The system is not to buy a ticket, but to back certain numbers to come out. The numbers run from one to ninety, and five are drawn every week. You can play the single number, the ambo, and the terno—that is, two numbers or three, and four and five if you like. If you play the ambo you name two numbers to come out, and if you are right you are paid by the Government three hundred times your stake. That stake can be what you like, from a penny to a pound. If you back a terno you get proportionately more; if you name all five you get sixty thousand times your stake.

With this game brought within the reach of all classes, you can readily imagine that the lottery shops are besieged all day long. Every peasant, every servant, every beggar plays at the lottery. The vice is national; it is in the blood; it is part of the Neapolitan character. There are a hundred superstitions among the people concerning the lottery. If you meet a white horse you play such and such a number: if you meet a funeral, if you hear a donkey bray, if you see a man with red whiskers—whatever happens, the Neapolitan takes it as an augury of a certain number, and he plays it accordingly.

Some of the priests have great success in foretelling successful numbers. One of the monks who walk about soliciting alms once had a great reputation. To anyone who gave him charity he whispered a number. He was so successful that at last he could not move out without being surrounded by crowds, who demanded a number to play. He lost his temper, and refused to tell anybody. The crowd thereupon seized him, and he was carried away and shut up in a cellar in a house, where he was beaten with a stick to make him tell the number. Still he refused, and they swore they would keep him prisoner until he consented; but the poor priest fell ill, and then, getting alarmed lest he should die, his assailants took him out and put him in the street, where he was picked up by the police. He was taken to the hospital, where he died, but before he breathed his last he gave ‘numbers’ to the sick in his ward. They told others, and the entire hospital—patients, doctors, and nurses—played the poor monk’s numbers, an ambo, and those numbers came out of the wheel. The Naples lottery lost an enormous sum, but it gained again next week, when every living soul put every shilling they had got in the world on the poor monk’s terno, which, fortunately for the Government, didn’t come out as the ambo had done.

There is one remarkable feature about the Naples Museum, which is, that each of the old gentlemen who act as custodians of a room quietly whispers into your ear that he should like to do business with you. One dear old boy actually found out my hotel, and arrived in the evening and asked to see me, having with him a book about the museum which he was sure I should like to buy, as it was very rare and very curious. When I had bought it I discovered that it was the 1888 edition of a work published in Ludgate Hill, London.

The English are the special prey of the touts in the Museum—in fact, they seem to be special prey everywhere. Everybody in Naples knows enough English to waylay them with. Even the objectionable ‘guides’ who stand outside the CafÉ de l’Europe at night, and in the expressive language of the country are called ‘ruffiani,’ ply their highly objectionable calling in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. And a little barefooted Neapolitan imp who sells matches outside the San Carlo Theatre shouts morning, noon, and night, in a shrill treble, ‘Here yare, sare—vant some matches!’ In addition to this a peripatetic trade in Holywell Street literature and art is openly plied by men in the streets, who expatiate upon the character of their wares in fluent English, and follow the British or American tourist for a quarter of a mile in their endeavour to persuade him to become a purchaser.

After all, England is not such a great place in everybody’s eyes as it is in our own. I travelled with an Italian priest from Naples to Pompeii, and we told each other stories in French—not French stories, bien entendu. He had just come from Sicily, where he had been tutor in a great Duke’s family, and when he wanted to teach the Duke’s son some English history, the Duke said: ‘Nonsense! let him learn the history of Sicily first; what is the use of his troubling about the small countries like England?’ I met a Neapolitan, too, not long ago—a Neapolitan Count from Otranto—who asked me many questions concerning England. I told him it was a great country. ‘Is it as great a country as Greece?’ he said. ‘Oh, much greater!’ I replied; ‘the two are not to be compared.’ The Count shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he exclaimed; ‘I see many Greek ships at Otranto, but very seldom an English one.’