eement with what
everybody has always said of Naples. It is so quite what you expect that
if you could you would turn away in satiety, especially from the
swarming life of the poor, which seems to have no concealments from the
public, but frankly works at all the trades and arts that can be carried
on out-of-doors; cooks, eats, laughs, cries, sleeps, wakes, makes love,
quarrels, scolds, does everything but wash itself--clothes enough it
washes for other people's life. There is a reason for this in the fact
that in bad weather at Naples it is cold and dark and damp in-doors, and
in fine so bright and warm and charming without that there is really no
choice. Then there is the expansive temperament, which if it were shut
up would probably be much more explosive than it is now. As it is, it
vents itself in volleyed detonations and scattered shots which language
can give no sense of.

For the true sense of it you must go to Naples, and then you will never
lose the sense of it. I had not been there since 1864, but when I woke
up the morning after my arrival, and heard the chickens cackling in the
Castel dell' Ovo, and the donkeys braying, and the cab-drivers
quarrelling, and the cries of the street vendors, and the dogs barking,
and the children wailing, and their mothers scolding, and the clatter of
wheels and hoops and feet, and all that mighty harmony of the joyful
Neapolitan noises, it seemed to me that it was the first morning after
my first arrival, and I was still only twenty-seven years old. As soon
as possible, when the short but sweet Vincenzo had brought up my
breakfast of tea and bread-and-butter and honey (to which my appetite
turned from the gross superabundance of the steamer's breakfasts with
instant acquiescence), and announced with a smile as liberal as the
sunshine that it was a fine day, I went out for those impressions which
I had better make over to the reader in their original disorder.
Vesuvius, which was silver veiled the day before, was now of a soft,
smoky white, and the sea, of a milky blue, swam round the shore and out
to every dim island and low cape and cliffy promontory. The street was
full of people on foot and in trolleys and cabs and donkey
pleasure-carts, and the familiar teasing of cabmen and peddlers and
beggars began with my first steps toward what I remembered as the
Toledo, but what now called itself, with the moderner Italian
patriotism, the Via Roma. The sole poetic novelty of my exp