flights again. And there
were nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the _cafe_. I remember
once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long
enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the _Ripetta_, where people
were going about in boats, and Rome looked like the Venice to which I
had then never been, and we met King Humbert and Queen Margherita in his
American trotting wagon driving down alone so as to show their sympathy,
for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person
when their people were in trouble: not so many weeks before we had
watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted King Humbert on his
return from visiting the cholera-stricken town of Naples. And I remember
on _Befana_ Night we adjourned to the _Piazza Navona_ to blow horns and
reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours.
For the humours of the Carnival there was no need to leave the _cafe_,
where one _Pulcinello_ after another broke into our talk with witticisms
that kept the _cafe_ in an uproar, and for me destroyed whatever
sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last
night in Rome--the last of the friendly nights of talk in the
_Nazionale_ to which we always returned no matter how far we might
occasionally stray from it--the friendly nights of talk when I learned
my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered,
that anything in the world existed, save art.

_Pulcinello_, the newest of our Roman friends, went with us from Rome,
following us to Naples, a familiar face to lighten our homesickness for
the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of
the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors
and the talk of the _Nazionale_.

And _Pulcinello_ went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights
at the _Albergo del Sole_, that most delightful and impossible of all
the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a
century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the
sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and
flowers were sweet in the land--can anyone who ever smelt it forget the
sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of
Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the _Sole_. And it
was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged
round the three sides of an unkempt, mud