All The Way To The Top It Was Banked On Either Side
With Glowing Masses Of Flowers And Fruits And The Spectacular Vegetables
Of The South, And Between These There Were Series Of People, Whom I
Tacitly Delegated To Make The Ascent For Me, Passing The Groups
Bargaining At The Stalls.
Nothing could have been better; nothing that I
think of is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead
level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though there
are places on the East River where we might easily have inclined
markets.
Other associations of that far past awoke with my identification of the
hotel where we had stayed at the end of the Villa Nazionale. In those
days the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered
then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a mere
pension, though it looks over the same length of palm-shaded,
statue-peopled garden. The palms were larger than I remembered them, and
the statues had grown up and seemed to have had large families since my
day; but the lovely sea was the same, with all the mural decorations of
the skyey horizons beyond, dim precipices and dreamy island tops, and
the dozing Vesuvius mistakable for any of them. At one place there was a
file of fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means
of a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a
splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy, bare
legs, and always there were beggars, both of those who frankly begged
and those who importuned with postal-cards.
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