between the French and Spanish powers in their quarrel over the people
one or other must make its prey; but whether it was to the greater
advantage of the Neapolitans to be battened on by the house of Aragon
and then that of Bourbon for the next six hundred years after the
Angevines had retired from the banquet is problematical. History is a
very baffling study, and one may be well content to know little or
nothing about it. I knew so little or had forgotten so much that I
scarcely deserved to be taken down into the crypt of this church and
shown the skeletons of four conspirators for Anjou whom Aragon had put
to death--two laymen and an archbishop by beheading, and a woman by
dividing crosswise into thirds. The skeletons lay in their tattered and
dusty shrouds, and I suppose were authentic enough; but I had met them,
poor things, too late in my life to Avish for their further
acquaintance. Once I could have exulted to search out their story and
make much of it; but now I must leave it to the reader's imagination,
along with most other facts of my observation in Naples.

I was at some pains to look up the traces of my lost youth there, and if
I could have found more of them no doubt I should have been more
interested in these skeletons. Eor forty-odd years I had remembered the
prodigious picturesqueness of certain streets branching from a busy
avenue and ascending to uplands above by stately successions of steps.
When I demanded these of my guide, he promptly satisfied me, and in a
few moments, there in the Chiaja, we stood at the foot of such a public
staircase. I had no wish to climb it, but I found it more charming even
than I remembered. All the way to the top it was banked on either side
with glowing masses of flowers and fruits and the spectacular vegetables
of the South, and between these there were series of people, whom I
tacitly delegated to make the ascent for me, passing the groups
bargaining at the stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I