We Did Not Demand Too Much Social Information Of Him; All The More We Valued The Gratuitous Fact That The Neapolitan Nobles Were Now Rather Poor, Because They Preferred A Life Of Pleasure To A Life Of Business.

I could have told him that the American nobles were increasingly like them in their love of pleasure, but I would not have known how to explain that they were not poor also.

He was himself 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.

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