,
_Public Letter-writer,
In the arches of the Theatre San Carlo, Naples._"

CHAPTER V.

If there is one place more than another for which I entertain a dislike
that is akin to hatred, it is for Naples in the summer time--that
wretched period when every one one knows is absent, all the large houses
are closed, the roads are knee-deep in dust, and even the noise of the
waves breaking upon the walls of the Castello del' Ovo seems unable to
alleviate the impression of heat and dryness which pervades everything.
It is the season when the hotels, usually so cool--one might almost say
frigid--have had time to grow hot throughout, and are in consequence
well-nigh unbearable; when the particular waiter who has attended to
your wants during each preceding visit, and who has come to know your
customs and to have survived his original impression that each
successive act on your part is only a more glaring proof of your insular
barbarity, is visiting his friends in the country, or whatever it is
that waiters do during the dull season when the tourists have departed
and their employers have no further use for them. It was at this
miserable period of the year that I descended upon Naples in search of
Monsieur Pharos.

Owing to a breakdown on the line between Spezia and Pisa, it was close
upon midnight before I reached my destination, and almost one o'clock
before I had transported my luggage from the railway station to my
hotel. By this time, as will be readily understood by all those who
have made the overland journey, I was in a condition bordering upon
madness. Ever since I had called upon Sir George Legrath, and had
obtained from him the address of the man from whom I hoped to learn the
whereabouts of Pharos, I had been living in a kind of stupor. It took
the form of a drowsiness that nothing would shake off, and yet, do what
I would, I could not sleep. Times out of number during that long journey
I had laid myself back in the railway carriage and closed my eyes in the
hope of obtaining some rest; but it was in vain. However artfully I
might woo the drowsy god, sleep would not visit my eyelids. The mocking
face of the man I had come to consider my evil angel was always before
me, and in the darkness of the night, when the train was rolling
southward, I could hear his voice in my ears telling me that this
hastily-conceived journey on my part had been all carefully thought out
and arranged by him beforeh