if disagreeable weather sets in I shall quickly return northwards.
They look at me dubiously, and ask themselves (I am sure) whether I
have not some more tangible motive than a lover of classical
antiquity. It ends with a compliment to the enterprising spirit of
the English race.

I have purchases to make, business to settle, and I must go hither
and thither about the town. Sirocco, of course, dusks everything to
cheerless grey, but under any sky it is dispiriting to note the
changes in Naples. _Lo sventramento_ (the disembowelling) goes on,
and regions are transformed. It is a good thing, I suppose, that the
broad Corso Umberto I. should cut a way through the old Pendino; but
what a contrast between that native picturesqueness and the
cosmopolitan vulgarity which has usurped its place! "_Napoli se ne
va_!" I pass the Santa Lucia with downcast eyes, my memories of ten
years ago striving against the dulness of to-day. The harbour,
whence one used to start for Capri, is filled up; the sea has been
driven to a hopeless distance beyond a wilderness of dust-heaps.
They are going to make a long, straight embankment from the Castel
dell'Ovo to the Great Port, and before long the Santa Lucia will be
an ordinary street, shut in among huge houses, with no view at all.
Ah, the nights that one lingered here, watching the crimson glow
upon Vesuvius, tracing the dark line of the Sorrento promontory, or
waiting for moonlight to cast its magic upon floating Capri! The
odours remain; the stalls of sea-fruit are as yet undisturbed, and
the jars of the water-sellers; women still comb and bind each
other's hair by the wayside, and meals are cooked and eaten _al
fresco_ as of old. But one can see these things elsewhere, and Santa
Lucia was unique. It has become squalid. In the grey light of this
sad billowy sky, only its ancient foulness is manifest; there needs