We continued on to Naples, and on the following morning took a local steamer for Sorrento. We had a look at Vesuvius, which was quiet and somewhat depressed—as it had lost six hundred feet of its cone at the last eruption.
SORRENTO
Landing at Sorrento we took a thirty-mile carriage drive along the precipitous coast, resting and lunching in a convent at Amalfi, perched high up on the hillside whither we had to climb. Then another drive to the train, which landed us back in Naples in the early hours of the morning.
MONTE CARLO
Again we embarked on the Cork, and landed at Villefranche. Next day we drove through Nice and on to Monte Carlo, where we witnessed the motor boat races. After dining at the Hotel de l'Hermitage, we visited the temple of chance with its twenty-five tables, devoted to a variety of games. It was all a distinct disappointment. The much vaunted decorations on the walls of the rooms were polychromatic but uninteresting—attempts at classic decoration such as an Italian sign-painter could easily equal when working for his board. The building itself was overdone in elaboration, and represented French architecture in the era when it had "broken loose." The grounds, however, were fine and the flower display the finest to be found anywhere. The players, men and women, were a debased crowd, of all nationalities. Sordid greed had eaten into their faces and there was no delight for them in anything except in grabbing the gold the turn of the wheel gave them—and it didn't give them much in return for what they staked. The games are "square." There is no cheating other than the well understood "percentage" in favor of the bank, but they are played so quickly that the player's capital is turned over thousands of times in a week, and as each turn means on the average a loss to him of the "percentage," the money does not last long. Some gamblers plunge for large sums for a short time, and are lucky enough to "break the bank at Monte Carlo;" but they return and give it all back to the prince with interest. All he asks of them is that they shall keep on playing at his game. The visitor wonders most at the dexterity with which the money of all varieties is raked, tossed and flung about the board by the croupiers, with apparently the utmost recklessness and without mistakes. They have spent their lives at it and know it the way Paderewski knows his keyboard. Three men are employed at each table to follow all the betting, and they watch like hawks every one playing. So perfectly is the whole thing done that never a word is spoken; it's all action—simply the placing of the coin on the spot. Most of the players have systems they follow, and prick their cards at each play. Hundreds of others who have no money follow their systems, just to see whether they would have won if they had had anything to risk.
