variety,
and very difficult to understand. When I had finished trying to
translate the morning paper, I used to attack the card. I found that it
threw quite a light upon early American civilisation from the aboriginal
side. 'Hominy,' 'Grits,' 'Buckwheats,' 'Cantelopes,' are some of the
dishes I remember. 'Succotash,' too, and 'creamed squash,' but I think
they occurred at dinner generally. I used to summon the waiter, and
when he came to take my orders I would ask him to derive those dishes. I
had great difficulty after a time in summoning a waiter. But the plan
gave me many interesting half hours. In the end I usually ordered a
chop."

"I don't want to run down your politics," poppa said, "but that's what I
call being too conservative. Augusta, if you have had enough of the Bay
of Naples and the moon, I might remind you of the buried city of
Pompeii, which is on for to-morrow. It's a good long way out, and you'll
want all your powers of endurance. I'm going down to have a smoke, and a
look at the humorous publications of Italy. There's no sort of
sociability about these hotels, but the head _portier_ knows a little
English."

"I suppose I had better retire," momma admitted, "though I sometimes
wish Mr. Wick wasn't so careful of my nervous system. Delicious scene,
good-night." And she too left us.

We were sitting in a narrow balcony that seemed to jut out of a horn of
the city's lovely crescent. Dicky and Isabel occupied chairs at a
distance nicely calculated to necessitate a troublesome raising of the
voice to communicate with them. Mrs. Portheris was still confined to her
room with what was understood to be the constitutional shock of her
experiences in the Catacombs. Dicky, in joyful privacy, assured me that
nobody could recover from a combination of Roman tallow and French kid
in less than a week, but I told him he did not know the British
constitution.

[Illustration: We were sitting in a narrow balcony.]

The moon sailed high over Naples, and lighted the lapping curve of her
perfect bay in the deepest, softest blue, and showed us some of the
nearer houses of the city, sloping and shouldering and creeping down,
that they were pink and yellow and parti-coloured, while the rest curved
and glimmered round the water in all tender tones of white holding up a
thousand lamps. And behind, curving too, the hills stood clear, with the
grey phantom of Vesuvius in sharp familiar lines, sending up its stream
of steady r