a. It would only last three
days, it was very unusual, and all that. The next day it was colder, and
the next colder yet. Snow fell, and blew about unmelted: I saw it in the
streets of Pompeii.

The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks of the marble
statues in the Chiaia. And yet the oranges glowed like gold among their
green leaves; the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed in all
the gardens. It is the most contradictory climate. We lunched one day,
sitting in our open carriage in a lemon grove, and near at hand the
Lucrine Lake was half frozen over. We feasted our eyes on the brilliant
light and color on the sea, and the lovely outlined mountains round the
shore, and waited for a change of wind. The Neapolitans declare that
they have not had such weather in twenty years. It is scarcely one's
ideal of balmy Italy.

Before the weather changed, I began to feel in this great Naples, with
its roaring population of over half a million, very much like the sailor
I saw at the American consul's, who applied for help to be sent home,
claiming to be an American. He was an oratorical bummer, and told his
story with all the dignity and elevated language of an old Roman. He
had been cast away in London. How cast away? Oh! it was all along of a
boarding-house. And then he found himself shipped on an English vessel,
and he had lost his discharge-papers; and "Listen, your honor," said he,
calmly extending his right hand, "here I am cast away on this desolate
island with nothing before me but wind and weather."

RAVENNA

A DEAD CITY

Ravenna is so remote from the route of general travel in Italy, that
I am certain you can have no late news from there, nor can I bring you
anything much later than the sixth century. Yet, if you were to see
Ravenna, you would say that that is late enough. I am surprised that a
city which contains the most interesting early Christian churches and
mosaics, is the richest in undisturbed specimens of early Christian
art, and contains the only monuments of Roman emperors still in their
original positions, should be so seldom visited. Ravenna has been dead
for some centuries; and because nobody has cared to bury it, its ancient
monuments are yet above ground. Grass grows in its wide streets, and its
houses stand in a sleepy, vacant contemplation of each other: the wind
must like to mourn about its silent squares. The waves of the Adriatic
once brought the commerce of the East