I do not know whether poverty avails itself of its privileges by
visiting the Neapolitan gallery; but probably, like poverty elsewhere,
it is too much interested by the drama of life in its own quarter ever
willingly to leave it. Poverty is very conservative, for reasons more
than one; its quarter in Naples is the oldest, and was the most
responsive to our recollections of the Naples of 1864. Overhead the
houses tower and beetle with their balconies and bulging casements,
shutting the sun, except at noon, from the squalor below, where the
varied dwellers bargain and battle and ply their different trades,
bringing their work from the dusk of cavernous shops to their doorways
for the advantage of the prevailing twilight. Carpentry and tailoring
and painting and plumbing, locksmithing and copper-smithing go on there,
touching elbows with frying and feeding, and the vending of all the
strange and hideous forms of flesh, fish, and fowl. If you wish to know
how much the tentacle of a small polyp is worth you may chance to see a
cent pass for it from the crone who buys to the boy who sells it smoking
from the kettle; but the price of cooked cabbage or pumpkin must remain
a mystery, along with that of many raw vegetables and the more revolting
viscera of the less-recognizable animals.

The poor people worming in and out around your cab are very patient of
your progress over the terrible floor of their crooked thoroughfare,
perhaps because they reciprocate your curiosity, and perhaps because
they are very amiable and not very sensitive. They are not always
crowded into these dismal chasms; their quarter expands here and there
into market-plates, like the fish-market where the uprising of the
fisherman Masaniello against the Spaniards fitly took place; and the
Jewish market-place, where the poor young Corra-dino, last of the
imperial Hohenstaufen line, was less appropriately beheaded by the
Angevines. The open spaces are not less loathsome than the reeking
alleys, but if you have the intelligent guide we had you approach them
through the triumphal arch by which Charles V. entered Naples, and that
is something. Yet we will now talk less of the emperor than of the
guide, who appealed more to my sympathy.

He had been six years in America, which he adored, because, he said, he
had got work and earned his living there the very day he landed. That
was in Boston, where he turned his hand first to one thing and then
another, and came