ve to do without my baths of
asses' milk for several days; and where would be my royal complexion?

It was six o'clock, and dark, when we came in sight of something which
made me cry out "Oh!" It was a dull red light, high up in the sky, and a
dark shape, like a great wounded bull, with two streams of fiery blood
pouring down its gored sides. Vesuvius! Brown had planned that we should
see it for the first time after dark. I had wondered why he suggested
not leaving Rome till twelve o'clock, when usually he is so keen on
early starts, and he was evasive when I asked why. But when I had
breathed that "Oh!" and had a moment to recover myself, he told me.

Dad, dear, Brown is splendid. He has _revealed_ Naples to me. I can't
express it in any other way, for nobody else who has told me about
coming to Naples has ever done the things that we have; and they would
not have occurred to Aunt Mary or me. We should have gone the ordinary
round if it hadn't been for him, and when we said good-bye to her Naples
would have been only a mere acquaintance of ours, not a dear and
intimate friend who has told us her best secrets. In the first place, we
shouldn't have known any better than to stop in some big, _obvious_ sort
of hotel in the noisy wasps' nest of the city, instead of coming here
where the air is pure and some of the most beautiful things in the
world in sight without turning our heads. It's such a homelike hotel,
and instead of sending to _England_ for orange marmalade made of
Sicilian oranges, the way all the other hotels seem to do, they make it
themselves out of their own oranges; and it's a poem.

We've been up Vesuvius, not in the daytime, like the humdrum tourists,
but by torchlight, and we saw the moon rise. Instead of rushing to the
Museum the first thing and mooning vaguely about there for hours, we
saved it until after we'd been out to Pompeii on the motor-car; then it
was a hundred times more interesting, and we are coming back after Capri
to pay another visit to the busts of Tiberius and his terrible mother. I
felt in Rome as if it were an impertinence to be modern and young. But
in Pompeii--oh, I can't tell you what I felt there. I think--I really do
think that I saw ghosts, and they were much more real and important than
I. It was like entering the enchanted palace of the Sleeping Beauty in
the wood, only a thousand times more thrilling and wonderful. I didn't
feel as if anyone else had ever been there since it