After the concert was over, we entered the salt water aquarium of Naples, which is famous throughout Europe as the finest and largest ichthyological collection in the world. In the glass tanks curious sea fish darted through the water, grotesque sea monsters crawled over the pebbles, and transparent jelly fish floated slowly; pink and white sea anemones, like a bed of flowers, opened and closed, and diminutive sea animals, almost invisible, spread thread-like tentacles; sponges and coral grew upon the rocks, and mollusks showed by their movements that they had life.
One evening we drove to the suburban village of Posilipo and from the cliffs at that place saw the sun descend in glory, a golden ball dropping into a radiant sea. While we were returning, a picturesque beggar with a crooked stick and one string across it trotted alongside our carriage, trying to convince us that he was a musician and his music worth a penny. At dusk, an Italian boy ran alongside the carriage, opened and lit the carriage lamps while the horse was moving at a rapid gait, and asked for payment.
Naples is a city of striking contrasts. It was interesting to study them. We drove over well paved streets, admiring marble palaces, great hotels, and beautiful homes; but with feelings very different from admiration we walked through narrow, filthy thoroughfares, densely populated, where networks of clothes lines with garments of all colors hung overhead. We saw high-spirited horses and superb carriages in the avenues and parks, and teams of handsome cream-colored oxen in the suburbs: but we saw also in the highways, small, rough-coated donkeys overburdened with panniers of fruit; tall, bony horses mismatched with diminutive donkeys; incongruous teams composed of a cow and a donkey, or a large ox and a small cow; and a team even more grotesquely made up of a horse, a cow, and a donkey. We saw the elite of the city elegantly dressed in the latest fashion promenading in the shopping districts; but on the sidewalks of the tenement district we saw slovenly barefooted women washing clothes, cooking maccaroni, scrubbing children in a tub, and combing children's hair with fine combs, regardless of our curious gaze. Here, too, we saw boys, apparently eight or ten years of age, playing in the streets with no other clothing than a shirt reaching to the knees, and women peddlers of mineral water dressed in ragged red blouses and blue skirts, who, with disordered hair and stockingless, slipshod feet, shuffled by pushing hand-carts filled with earthen jugs.
PEASANT GIRLS THEIR BURDENS BEAR.
On the avenues street peddlers besought us to purchase canes, matches, coral beads, and souvenirs cut out of lava, but asked prices four or five times their actual value. On the narrow streets dealers in cooked viands for the home trade did an active business at low prices, but did not think it worth while to offer us the hot potatoes, maccaroni, fried fish, and stewed meats which they prepared on little sidewalk stoves.
AMALFI, WHERE THE WAVES AND MOUNTAINS MEET.
The trip from Naples to Pompeii was made by rail in less than an hour. At the gates of the enclosure we each paid an admission fee of two lire, or forty cents, and official guides were assigned to conduct the party through the streets of the excavated city.
"About one hundred and fifty years ago," explained the guide, "a farmer ploughed up some objects of art in this locality. The government, hearing of the discovery, ordered investigation to be made. Removal of the soil disclosed a house and furniture and articles of value. The excavations, carried on irregularly for a century, then continued regularly but slowly for the past fifty years and still in progress, revealed the ancient city that had been smothered in ashes and buried from sight for eighteen hundred years. The wooden roofs, crushed in by the weight above them, had crumbled into dust, but the walls and columns, the altars and statues, the fountains and baths, the paved streets and mosaic pavements, and the frescoes on the walls had been preserved by the covering of ashes, and were in almost as good condition as when deserted by the terror-stricken inhabitants. All articles of value, as soon as found by the excavators, were carried away to the museums and carefully preserved; but the uncovered walls were left exposed to the weather, and, as you will see, are badly damaged and defaced. The government for the past few years, however, has been protecting the newly excavated buildings by enclosing and roofing them over, and in these we shall find the beautiful Pompeian red and blue colors and the dainty frescoes well preserved on the walls."