s, we were almost inclined to
curse this same railroad. We had thought, in our innocence, that we
should be alone, that no one else would think of enduring the long four
hours' ride from Naples just to spend two hours in the ruins of these
temples; but the event proved our unwisdom. We were _not_ alone. It was
a compact little party of conventional sight-seers that accompanied us.
The inevitable English family with the three daughters, prominent of
teeth, flowing of hair, aggressive of scarlet Murrays and Baedekers; the
two blond and untidy Germans; a French couple from the pages of _La Vie
Parisienne_; and our "old man of the sea," the white-bearded
Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania who had made our life miserable
in Rome at the time of the Pope's Jubilee. Fortunately for us, this
terrible old man had fastened himself upon a party of American
school-teachers travelling _en Cook_, and for the time we were safe; but
our vision of two hours of dreamy solitude faded lamentably away.

Yet how beautiful it was! this golden meadow walled with far, violet
mountains, breathless under a May sun; and in the midst, rising from
tangles of asphodel and acanthus, vast in the vacant plain, three
temples, one silver gray, one golden gray, and one flushed with
intangible rose. And all around nothing but velvet meadows stretching
from the dim mountains behind, away to the sea, that showed only as a
thin line of silver just over the edge of the still grass.

The tide of tourists swept noisily through the Basilica and the temple
of Poseidon across the meadow to the distant temple of Ceres, and Tom
and I were left alone to drink in all the fine wine of dreams that was
possible in the time left us. We gave but little space to examining the
temples the tourists had left, but in a few moments found ourselves
lying in the grass to the east of Poseidon, looking dimly out towards
the sea, heard now, but not seen,--a vague and pulsating murmur that
blended with the humming of bees all about us.

A small shepherd boy, with a woolly dog, made shy advances of
friendship, and in a little time we had set him to gathering flowers for
us: asphodels and bee-orchids, anemones, and the little thin green iris
so fairylike and frail. The murmur of the tourist crowd had merged
itself in the moan of the sea, and it was very still; suddenly I heard
the words I had been waiting for,--the suggestion I had refrained from
making myself, for I knew Thomas.