Bay of Naples," Irene was saying to
Mr. King, who had found a seat beside her in the little cabin; "the
guitar-strumming and the impassioned songs, only that always seems to me
a manufactured gayety, an attempt to cheat the traveler into the belief
that all life is a holiday. This is spontaneous."

"Yes, and I suppose the ancient Roman gayety, of which the Neapolitan
is an echo, was spontaneous once. I wonder if our society is getting to
dance and frolic along like that of old at Baiae!"

"Oh, Mr. King, this is an excursion. I assure you the American girl is a
serious and practical person most of the time. You've been away so long
that your standards are wrong. She's not nearly so knowing as she seems
to be."

The boat was preparing to land at Newport News--a sand bank, with a
railway terminus, a big elevator, and a hotel. The party streamed along
in laughing and chatting groups, through the warehouse and over the
tracks and the sandy hillocks to the hotel. On the way they captured
a novel conveyance, a cart with an ox harnessed in the shafts, the
property of an aged negro, whose white hair and variegated raiment
proclaimed him an ancient Virginian, a survival of the war. The company
chartered this establishment, and swarmed upon it till it looked like a
Neapolitan 'calesso', and the procession might have been mistaken for a
harvest-home--the harvest of beauty and fashion. The hotel was captured
without a struggle on the part of the regular occupants, a dance
extemporized in the dining-room, and before the magnitude of the
invasion was realized by the garrison, the dancing feet and the laughing
girls were away again, and the little boat was leaping along in the
Elizabeth River towards the Portsmouth Navy-yard.

It isn't a model war establishment this Portsmouth yard, but it is
a pleasant resort, with its stately barracks and open square and
occasional trees. In nothing does the American woman better show her
patriotism than in her desire to inspect naval vessels and understand
dry-docks under the guidance of naval officers. Besides some old war
hulks at the station, there were a couple of training-ships getting
ready for a cruise, and it made one proud of his country to see the
interest shown by our party in everything on board of them, patiently
listening to the explanation of the breech-loading guns, diving down
into the between-decks, crowded with the schoolboys, where it is
impossible for a man to stand upright