had not been understood in the old days. But
then, in the old days, she was a petted and spoiled child, and would
never try to work until the last year of her life with the Earl,
after he had extorted from her a promise to do differently.

Obed Chute saw her success in her new position with undisguised
satisfaction. But now that she had become a governess he was not at
all inclined to relax his exertions in her behalf. She was of too
much importance, he said, to waste her life and injure her health in
constant drudgery, and so he determined that she should not suffer
for want of recreation. In Naples there need never be any lack of
that. The city itself, with its noisy, laughing, jovial population,
seems to the English eye as though it was keeping one perpetual
holiday. The Strada Toledo looks to the sober northerner as though a
constant carnival were going on. Naples has itself to offer to the
visitor, with its never-ending gayety and its many-sided life--its
brilliant cafes, its lively theatres, its gay pantomimes, its
buffooneries, its macaroni, its lazaroni, and its innumerable
festivities. Naples has also a cluster of attractions all around it,
which keep their freshness longer than those of any other city. Among
these Obed Chute continued to take Zillah. To him it was the best
happiness that he could desire when he had succeeded in making the
time pass pleasantly for her. To see her face flush up with that
innocent girlish enthusiasm, and to hear her merry laugh, which was
still childlike in its freshness and abandon, was something so
pleasant that he would chuckle over it to himself all the evening
afterward.

So, as before, they drove about the environs or sailed over the bay.
Very little did Obed Chute know about that historic past which lived
and breathed amidst all these scenes through which he wandered. No
student of history was he. To him the cave of Polyphemus brought no
recollections; the isle of Capri was a simple isle of the sea, and
nothing more; Misenum could not give to his imagination the vanished
Roman navies; Puzzuoli could not show the traces of Saint Paul; and
there was nothing which could make known to him the mighty footprints
of the heroes of the past, from the time of the men of Osca, and
Cumae, and the builders of Paestum's Titan temples, down through all
the periods of Roman luxury, and through all gradations of men from
Cicero to Nero, and down farther to the last, and not the least of