ul-mouthed, God-forsaken little boys; and then through
the midst of all, as a black swan swimming stately through muddy waters,
comes a splendid, princely equipage, all in mourning, from the black
horses to the heavy veil just raised across a young widow's white
face--and so, from contrast to contrast, through the dense city, and
down to the teeming port, and out at last to the magic southern sea,
where the clean life of the white-sailed ships passes silently, and
scarce leaves a momentary wake to mar the pure waters of the tideless
bay.

But there is life everywhere,--reckless, excessive, and the desire for
life as a supreme good, worth living for its own sake--even if it is to
be food for the next year's pestilence--a life that can support itself
on anything, and thrive in its own fashion in the flashing sun, and the
dust and the dirt, and multiply beyond measure and mysteriously fast.
Only here and there in the swarm something permanent and fossilized
stands solid and unchanging, and divides the flight of the myriad
ephemeral lives--a monument, a church, a fortress, a palace: or,
perhaps, the figure of some man of sterner race, with grave eyes and
strong, thin lips, and manly carriage, looms in the crowd, and by its
mere presence seems to send all the rest down a step to a lower level of
humanity.

Such a man was Taquisara, the Sicilian, of whom the old Duca della Spina
had spoken. He had no permanent abode in Naples, but lived in a hotel
down by the public gardens, beyond Santa Lucia; and on the day after the
Duca had been to see the Countess Macomer, he strolled up as usual, by
short cuts and narrow streets, to see his friend Gianluca in the Spina
palace, in the upper part of the city. Many people looked at him, as he
went by, and some knew him for a Sicilian, by his face, while some took
him for a foreigner, and pressed upon him to beg, or made faces and vile
gestures at him, as soon as he could not see, after the manner of the
lower Neapolitans. But he passed calmly on, supremely indifferent, his
handsome, manly face turning neither to the right nor the left.

He might have stood for the portrait of a Saracen warrior of the
eleventh century, with his high, dark features and keen eyes, his even
lips, square jaw, and smooth, tough throat. He had, too, something of
the Arabian dignity in his bearing, and he walked with long,
well-balanced steps, swiftly, but without haste, as the Arab walks
barefooted in the sand