Mr. Peasley is still with us
We waited for him in London until he recovered his lost trunk, and he was so grateful that he decided to go along with us.
He said that he was foot-loose and without any definite plans and it always made him feel more at home to travel with people who were just as green and as much scared as he was.
A week ago we were in London—sloshing about in the damp and dismal mixture of mud and snow which lined the dark thoroughfares.
This morning we are basking in the crystal sunlight of Naples—the blue bay, with the crescent outline on one side, the white walls of the mounting city on the other, Vesuvius looming in the distance behind a hazy curtain, and tourists crowding the landscape in the immediate foreground.
Three big steamers are lying at anchor within the breakwater—one from Genoa, one from Marseilles, and one from New York—and all heavily laden with Americans, some sixty of whom will be our fellow-passengers to Alexandria. The hotels are overflowing with Yankee pilgrims, and every Neapolitan who has imitation coral and celluloid tortoise shell for sale is wearing an expectant smile.
The jack-rabbit horses attached to the ramshackle little victorias lean wearily in their shafts, for these are busy days. The harvest days are at hand. The Americans have come. An English woman who had seen the horde in the streets here remarked to a friend this morning, "It must be awfully lonesome in America just at present."
And she meant it, too.
It has been a fairly busy week for Mr. Peasley. Mr. Peasley is addicted to the habit of taking notes. Every night at the hotel he takes out a small leather-bound book presented to him by an insurance company in America in appreciation of the fact that he has paid the company all his ready money for the last fifteen years, and in this small volume he jots down brief memoranda.