time
showed extraordinary muscular strength and energy, gathering itself
together into a compact purple tassell or worm. The jelly-fish were also
remarkably beautiful, with their graceful movements and purple glancing
hues. This Aquarium certainly gave us a little comprehension of the
marvellous beauty of oceanic life.

Of the 250 churches at Naples, few possess a great amount of interest,
though some of them are well worth visiting. The Duomo San Gennaro, in
the Strada del Duomo, is a large and handsome Cathedral. It is built on
the sites of the temples of Neptune and Apollo, and contains several
tombs of great men. It is here that the supposed miracle of the
liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius is "performed" twice or
thrice a year.

One evening we went to the grand Teatro Reale di San Carlo, paying
sixteen shillings for a couple of _Pit_ tickets. It is an immense house,
supposed to be the largest in the world, gorgeously decorated, with six
tiers of boxes, and capable of holding several thousand people. There
was not a large audience, however, and as I looked round, eager to
discover some of the living ideals of Italian loveliness, I was
disappointed to find that but few of the Neapolitan ladies possessed any
commanding grace or beauty, neither did their dress betoken much
refinement of taste. As the theatre is the time and place for the fair
sex to shine its brightest, I took this as a convincing proof that my
previous strictures on Italian beauty were not unjust or uncharitable.
The opera, which chanced to be "Lucia di Lammermoor," was very good,
both vocally and instrumentally, and the dancing was clever and
graceful, but to our English eye bordering on the immodest; the
spectators, however, greatly applauded it, and probably they were the
best judges.

Vesuvius smoked continually during the day, and occasionally shot forth
lurid flames into the darkness of the night. We had a capital view of
his volcanic performances from our hotel windows, and found it
interesting to watch his eccentric ebullitions. Most of our
fellow-travellers made the ascent, but as we did not intend to make any
stay in Naples--my wife being anxious to pay a long-promised visit to
her sister in Malta--we decided to defer the expedition to some future
occasion, particularly as we wished to make an excursion to Pompeii, the
collection at the museum having greatly interested us and aroused our
curiosity. Nowadays the ascent of Vesuviu