-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. This terrible traffic
pervades all southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting
traveller with undesired bargains. In its presence it is almost
impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own
that it has its rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell,
or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor
problem, so many-faced in our time. Would it be better that they should
take to open mendicancy, or try to win the soft American heart with such
acquired slang as "Skiddoo to twenty-three"? One who had no postal-cards
had English enough to say he would go away for a penny; it was his
price, and I did not see how he could take less; when he was reproached
by a citizen of uncommon austerity for his shameless annoyance of
strangers, I could not see that he looked abashed--in fact, he went away
singing. He did not take with him the divine beauty of the afternoon
light on the sea and mountains; and, if he was satisfied, we were
content with our bargain.

In fact, it would be impossible to exaggerate in the praise of that
incomparable environment. At every hour of the day, and, for all I know,
the night, it had a varying beauty and a constant loveliness. Six days
out of the week of our stay the sunshine was glorious, and five days of
at least a May or September warmth; and though one day was shrill and
stiff with the _tramontana,_ it was of as glorious sunshine as the rest.
The gale had blown my window open and chilled my room, but with that sun
blazing outside I could not believe in the hurricane which seemed to
blow our car up the funicular railway when we mounted to the height
where the famous old Convent of San Martino stands, and then blew us all
about the dust-clouded streets of that upland in our search fo