Italian Days and Ways

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and vastly more beautiful. Indeed, no words written nor pictures painted give any adequate conception of the blueness of the sea, the soft purple shades upon the mountains, and the fine transparency and light

e omnipresent and much beloved artichoke, the fennel, like a coarse celery, and lettuce. Roses are climbing all over the walls of these hillside gardens, and in many of them orange

rtino. We visited San Martino the day after our arrival, because Zelphine had an irrepressible desire to get to the tip-top of everything and view both the city and bay from the heights above us. The ascent wa

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through the charming, picturesque cloisters, which are richly carved and of a stone warm and creamy in tone, so different from the heavy, dark cloisters one sees in England and elsewhere. Most of our morning was spent basking in th

reaching out into the sea, and off in the far distance the snow-line of the Apennines. To our left, Vesuvius, with its three peaks, was smoking away as peacefully as a Hollander on his hooge stoep. Seeing them by day it is hard to believe that these fair blue hills could have wrought sudden destruction upon the cities of the plain; but last night, when flames flashed up skyward from the smoking crater, I m

t now "William's yacht," as one of our English friends always calls it, is riding at anchor. The Kaiser is making o

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t whose worship Paul preached at Ephesus. A curious statue is this, odd enough to have fallen down from Jupiter, according to the tradition, or from any other heathen god! The torso is of fine, variegated marble, and the head, hands, and feet, the latter slender and delicate, are of bronze. This Diana is not a huntress, like the Greek Artemis with the crescent above her brow, but bea

above all, the lovely Narcissus, which they now call by another name. Zelphine and I have decided that we will never acknowledge this to be a Dionysus or anything less poetic than the Narcissus. This charming, youthful figure with the bent head and listening ear is quite small,

ol-girl idea of poetry-making, I should certainly be sending you a poem about the Narcissus; but why cudge

to the stream

his own dear

ssion for a horse evidently touched the driver's sense of humor, and, regarding it as a huge joke, he laughed and whipped the poor animal still more unmercifully, making us understand, in the gibberish of French and Italian peculiar to the cabmen here, that there was no need to be merciful to a creature without a soul. We longed for greater facilit

lity of caring for the comfort of dumb creatures, yet these apparently cruel people have a most kindly custom. If parents lose a child, and childre

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e at the Hotel B. At five o'clock in the afternoon, he told us, the beau monde could be seen taking an airing on the Chiaia, never earlier. It seems that Neapolitans of quality do not drive while the sun is sh

g eye. Having arranged with Zelphine about this rendezvous, I left her hanging over some Pompeian statuettes in a shop on the Toledo, copies, of course, but very good ones, quite too tempting to be safely dallied with, and made my way to Thomas Cook's office and to several glove shops. When my commissions were finished, I had more than an hour on my hands, so I lingered for some time before the ta

n in sight to help me, only a few beggars on the steps, who would naturally make common cause with the cabman. You will laugh at me, I am sure, but so terrified was I by the creature's language and gestures and whip-cracking that I abjectly stepped into his cab, telling him to drive me for an hour and set me down at the well-known coral shop on the Chiaia at five o'clock, showing him the time on my watch-face. Was I not just a bit like the woman who married a persistent suitor in order to get rid of him? Her troubles probably began then and there; mine certainly did. My cocher, with an irritating expression of triumph on his face, set forth upon a tour of sight-seeing which threatened to be of long duration. We passed from street to street, from building to building, until to my dismay I found that he was driving toward the upper town. I protested, knowing that there would not be time to get back to the Chiaia by five o'clock. Would I

American ideas, but no one wishes to be cheated, especially with one's eyes wide open. I protested, explained the state of affairs to the concierge, when, to my surprise, he, my ally and champion as I had thought

e have all trusted. It seems, indeed, as if every man's hand is against us in this beautiful city, from the salesman who tries to sell us imperfect coral to the craft

ce to the street below, where I took a tram to the Chiaia. Angela was seated in the carriage, looking around anxiousl

questions. "I saw a number of carriages coming down by the Square of the

t to be making a course with the languid, dark-eyed ladies and their a

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d fish from the Mediterranean, living coral, medus?, crested blubbers, airy and transparent as soap-bubbles, and the wonderful octopus. Angela insisted on seeing these horrible creatures fed, and by

however, Zelphine says that Virgil certainly wrote his "Georgics" and "?neid" in his villa near by, and that Petrarch considered this tomb sufficiently important to plant a laurel here. She and I have no patience with th

were feasted with the beauties of a gorgeous sunset. Vesuvius, Capri, Ischia, and all the smaller islands of the bay were bathed in heliotrope light, a royal array of purple

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the Vesu

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the purple p

a boat on the purple ba

y for a tour of several days, to Pompeii, La Cava, and P?stum, returning by the coast drive and stopping at A