elf a
moderate in politics, but he told us, what seems to be the fact
everywhere in Italy, that singly the largest party in Naples is the
Socialist party.

He went with me first one day to the beautiful old Church of Santa
Chiara, to show me the Angevine tombs there, in which I satisfied a
secret, lingering love for the Gothic; and then to the cathedral, where
the sacristan showed us everything but the blood of St. Jannarius,
perhaps because it was not then in the act of liquefying; but I am
thankful to say I saw one of his finger-bones. My guide had made me
observe how several of the churches on the way to this were built on the
sites and of the remnants of pagan temples, and he summoned the
world-old sacristan of St. Januarius to show us evidences of a rival
antiquity in the crypt; for it had begun as a temple of Neptune. The
sacristan practically lived in those depths and the chill sanctuary
above them, and-he was so full of rheumatism that you could almost hear
it creak as he walked; yet he was a cheerful sage, and satisfied with
the fee which my guide gave him and which he made small, as he
explained, that the sacristan might not be discontented with future
largesse. I need not say that each church we visited had its tutelary
beggar, and that my happy youth came back to me in the blindness of one,
or the mutilation of another, or the haggish wrinkles of a third. At
Santa Chiara I could not at first make out what it was which caused my
heart to rejoice so; but then I found that it was because the church was
closed, and we had to go and dig a torpid monk out of his crevice in a
cold, many-storied cliff near by, and get him to come and open it, just
as I used, with the help of neighbors, to do in the past.

Our day ended at sunset--a sunset of watermelon red--with a visit to the
Castel Nuovo, where my guide found himself at home with the garrison,
because, as he explained, he had served his term as a soldier. He was
the born friend of the custodian of the castle church, which was the
most comfortable church for warmth we had visited, and to which we
entered by the bronze gates of the triumphal arch raised in honor of the
Aragonese victory over the Angevines in 1442, when this New Castle was
newer than it is now. The bronze gates record in bas-relief the battles
between the French and Spanish powers in their quarrel over the people
one or other must make its prey; but whether it was to the greater
advantage of the Ne