Hours and hours it seemed to take, that drive to Pompeii.  Past the ambitious confectioner with his window full of cherry pies, each cherry round and red and shining like a marble, and the plate glass dry-goods store where ready-made costumes were displayed that looked as if they might fit just as badly as those of Westbourne Grove, and so by degrees and always down hill through narrower and shabbier streets where all the women walked bareheaded and the shops were mostly turned out on the pavement for the convenience of customers, and a good many of them went up and down in wheelbarrows.  And often through narrow ways so high-walled and many-windowed that it was quite cool and dusky down below, and only a strip of sun showed far up along the roofs of one side.  Here and there a wheelbarrow went strolling through these streets too, and we saw at least one family marketing.  From a little square window a prodigious way up came, as we passed, a cry with custom in it, and a wheelbarrow paused beneath.  Then down from the window by a long, long rope slid a basket from the hands of a young woman leaning out in red, and the vendor took the opportunity of sitting down on his barrow handle till it arrived.  Soldi and a piece of paper he took out of the basket and a cabbage and onions he put in, and then it went swinging upwards and he picked up his barrow again, and we rattled on and left him shouting and pushing his hat back—­it was not a soft felt but a bowler—­to look up at the other windows.  In spite of the bowler it was a picturesque and Neapolitan incident, and it left us much divided as to the contents of the piece of paper.

“My idea is,” said the Senator, “that the young woman in the red jersey was the hired girl and that note was what you might call a clandestine communication.”

“Since we are in Naples,” remarked Mr. Dod, “I think, Senator, your deduction is correct.  Where we come from a slavey with any self-respect would put her sentiments on a gilt-edged correspondence card in a scented envelope with a stamp on the outside and ask you to kindly drop it into the pillar box on your way to business; but this chimes in with all you read about Naples.”

“Perfectly ridiculous!” said momma.  “Mark my words, that note was either a list of vegetables wanted, or an intimation that if they weren’t going to be fresher than the last, that man needn’t stop for orders in future.  And in a country as destitute of elevators as this one is I suppose you couldn’t keep a servant a week if you didn’t let her save the stairs somehow.  But I must say if I were going to have cabbage and onions the same day I wouldn’t like the neighbours to know it.”

I entirely agreed with momma, and was reflecting, while they talked of something else, on the injustice of considering ours the sentimental sex, when the Senator leaned forward and advised me in an undertone to make a note of the market basket.

“And take my theory to account for the piece of paper,” said he; “your mother’s may be the most likely, but mine is what the public will expect.”