different owners, and it was only a small four-story block. Anything more un-hygienic than a Neapolitan house could not be imagined. The whole city, with the exception of a few modern quarters, is insufficiently drained, or not drained at all; the houses are badly ventilated, badly lighted, and without the most primitive hygienic conveniences. As for the poorer quarters, where the cholera broke out soon after I left the city, they can only be compared to the worst fever-dens of old London. Only in this dry, sunny climate filth seems less filthy, and, so long as the weather remains fine, Naples does not stink as one might expect. The terrible moment is after a rain-storm; and it was precisely after three days' rain that the cholera broke out this last time. The rain sets in solution and in decomposition all the dry filth of the city.
The life and amusements of the Neapolitans seem simple. Their chief distraction is eating frutti di mare—that is to say, shell-fish of all kinds—at Santa Lucia, the famous quay celebrated in the well-known popular barcarole, or in the innumerable osterie and restaurants that exist all round the vast bay. On Sunday they delight to drive horses furiously up hill and down; but above all they delight in fireworks and illuminations, for which they find a pretext in the innumerable religious fêtes which they celebrate. From January to December there is always a fête going on in some quarter of the town, the great feature of which is the illumination of the streets and of the district church. The facade of the church is always very beautifully illuminated with lines of colored glasses following the contours and ornaments of the architecture, and all the streets of the quarter are hung with drapery and banners and illuminated with monumental brass chandeliers and candelabra provided with petroleum-lamps. This improved material is the property of an English company which, I was told, has made a fortune by introducing the use of petroleum in the Neapolitan festa. I witnessed several of these fêtes, and, as far as I could see, the people get their fun simply by watching the religious processions in the daytime, admiring the illuminations at night, and dancing in the road-way to the music of the municipal band. As a final trait of the simplicity of Neapolitan manners and customs, I mention a curious scene I witnessed one afternoon. At one end of a small square, surrounded by lofty and irregular house-fronts, were ranged four long benches forming a square. Some fifty men and women were seated on these benches, while in the middle a bronzed, black-haired man, with a long black moustache and lantern jaws, was reading aloud, with the gestures and intonations of a dramatic actor, the pages of a thin folio volume,—an Italian translation of "The Three Musketeers." This man earned his living by reading aloud; he receives two centimes—say two-fifths of a cent—from each person seated, and nothing but attention from the outside listeners, who remain standing. Alexandre Dumas never had a better reader or a more appreciative audience than this little company in the Neapolitan square.
Of high life at Naples I did not see much. I was there in the summer, when the cosmopolitans are absent and when only the poor local aristocracy remains. As far as my experience went, I found nearly every gentleman to whom I was presented to be either a prince, a baron, or a count. I was privately informed that he was as poor as a rat; and I observed that he was dressed in English horsey style, and that his hair was carefully and excessively pomaded. My hostess, herself a Neapolitan lady, spoke very evilly of her compatriots, saying that they were poor, mean, inhospitable, that they lived on macaroni and beans in order to be able to keep a carriage, that they starved themselves to give a grand fête once a year, and never had a decent dinner on their tables. We saw this high society of Naples every afternoon between six and eight on the Riviera di Chiaja, the marine parade of Naples, which corresponds to Hyde Park at London and the Bois de Boulogne at Paris. In the
