lightly at his
English joke, "I can write wrong, it seems; but can I follow the
king?"

Just then Edith ran into the room crying, "Mother has decided to take
the noon train to Naples. Doesn't she do everything suddenly?" And
Rafael forgot his mother's letter in his pleasure over another
journey.

The car ride to Naples always remained in the boy's mind as a
succession of pictures; but no picture could reveal the many phases of
his mind as he passed from one experience to another in the days that
followed.

"The guide-book calls this the most fertile valley in Europe," said
Mrs. Sprague, as they rode along, catching glimpses of farmers plowing
in the fields. The distant hills were soft and blue, but on drawing
near to them, terraces and flights of steps were to be seen on the
slopes.

At last Edith called, "I see Vesuvius!" and the wonderful volcano lay
before them. Its smoke rose in a straight column and then broke,
trailing off into the distance like the smoke from an ocean liner.

"It makes the mountain look like a man-of-war," exclaimed Rafael, and
the two pairs of eyes hardly saw anything else until they reached
Naples.

"Let us go to a hotel where we can see the fire at night, if it comes
out of the volcano," said Edith; and they took rooms from which they
could watch every mood of Vesuvius.

Before they had been in the city three days Edith decided that she
liked it better than she did Rome. "The people there looked so
serious," she said, "while here they are very merry and sociable."

Mrs. Sprague laughed. "They are certainly sociable enough," she said.
"Yesterday I heard a woman read a letter aloud from an upper window to
her friend on the sidewalk below."

Edith laughed in her turn. "Was the window in the same house where we
saw the rooster and chickens in the upper balcony?" she asked.

[Illustration: "IT IS A FUNNY SIGHT TO SEE THE BOYS OF NAPLES EATING
MACARONI"]

Rafael felt a touch of sadness at hearing their light talk. "The poor
people!" he said. "When they live upstairs there is no other way but
for them to keep their animals up there with them."

"Many of them seem to live in the basements of the rich," observed the
girl.

To Rafael, the sight of such great poverty was no new thing, but Edith
spoke of it constantly, and wrote of it to her father in America.

"There seem to be nothing but happiness and laziness here among these
poor people," the letter said. "They liv