I had firmly decided that our party should stop at the Albergo della Rosa, and contrived to persuade the others in our group not to be influenced by the importunate Neapolitans.
The host—a short, unshaven, bibulous-looking person—appeared, and we were conducted to the second and third floors, and allowed to sort ourselves out into three large rooms, filled with single beds. All of the women and children were given a front room with light and air, and the men took the others.
Here occurred an evidence of that class feeling which exists from the beggar up in Italy. There is no democracy. By a very natural process, with no words or discussion, Nunzio Giunta, Antonio Squadrito, Nicola Curro and one or two others, who considered themselves members of a better class than our farmer-boys from Socosa, for instance, took the best room, leaving the third, which was dark and close, to the others, who accepted it without a murmur. In this connection I would note an amusing thing: Antonio never carried his own baggage till he reached America, nor did he ever fail to protest when I shouldered mine. He was afraid we should lose caste in the eyes of the people we met.
It was not ten minutes after we were indoors, before every member of the party was stretched out and sound asleep, being simply exhausted by the strain under which we had been for two days.
It was nearly six o’clock when the host roused everybody to tell them that if they wished to take advantage of the one meal a day the steamship broker was paying for, they should be going to the trattoria.
It was a subdued party that arrayed itself, filed down the stairs, and went to its first substantial meal since noon of the day before. There was less talking done than there had been over anything since we started from Gualtieri.
At the restaurant we found some hundreds of emigrants coming and going, and others seated at the tables. For a half hour we waited until those eating made room enough for us, and then we gathered around one of the large tables arranged about the long room, and soon were served by unkempt waiters with soup made with tomatoes and paste, a stew of meat and vegetables, the meat being from portions of the goat not the most savory, melons and wine. Poor little Ina was very hungry but very brave. She confessed, after we had all been cheered and stimulated by the meal, that she had been afraid she would “faint, and they would not let a fainty girl go to America.”
Nothing was of more interest to me than the rapid broadening of the mental scope of the children and young folks in our party. Pretty Concetta, in all her sixteen years, had never been away from home before. Some of the youths had never been outside the village community of Gualtieri. Little Ina showed how bright she is and how well she had understood all the wonders that had been told her, by refusing to be appalled by the tremendous size and unheard-of splendor of Naples, for such the town, shabby and tumbledown as it is in the parts they had visited, seemed to them. She took her new experiences as a matter of course.
We walked out into the city after supper, and Concetta was as nearly like a wild, frightened animal of the forest as anything of which I can think. As I knew the city well, I piloted them to the portions where there would be the most interesting sights in the sunset hours and the early evening. As we were crossing the Piazza Borsa, with its busy traffic and many speeding electric cars, she clung to Camela’s arm, and Camela clung to my wife. The passing horses and cars seemed to utterly bewilder them, and when we were little more than halfway across, Camela and Concetta broke into a wild run, and, despite my wife’s resistance, dragged her the remainder of the way to the sidewalk, the last spurt being directly in front of a Toretta train. When we were all safely assembled on the sidewalk, Giovanni Pulejo, himself trembling all over, turned to me and said:
“Oh, all this noise makes my head as big as my body. Let us go back to the house.”