“A reg’lar chaperone might think differently,” he reflected; “but thank goodness there are no dragons swimming in our cup of happiness.”

One day they devoted to Capri and the Blue Grotto, and afterward they lunched at the Quisisana and passed the afternoon in the town.  But the charms of Sorrento were too great for Capri to win their allegiance, and they were glad to get back to their quaint town and delightful gardens again.

The week passed all too swiftly, and then came a letter from Colonel Angeli telling them to return to Naples and witness the results of the eruption.  This they decided to do, and bidding good-bye to Signor Floriano and his excellent hotel they steamed across the bay and found the “Vesuve” a vastly different hostelry from the dismal place they had left in their flight from Naples.  It was now teeming with life, for, all danger being past, the tourists had flocked to the city in droves.  The town was still covered with ashes, but under the brilliant sunshine it did not look as gloomy as one might imagine, and already thousands of carts were busily gathering the dust from the streets and dumping it in the waters of the bay.  It would require months of hard work, though, before Naples could regain a semblance of its former beauty.

Their friend the Colonel personally accompanied them to the towns that had suffered the most from the eruption.  At Boscatrecasa they walked over the great beds of lava that had demolished the town—­banks of cinders looking like lumps of pumice stone and massed from twenty to thirty feet in thickness throughout the valley.  The lava was still so hot that it was liable to blister the soles of their feet unless they kept constantly moving.  It would be many more days before the interior of the mass became cold.

Through the forlorn, dust-covered vineyards they drove to San Guiseppe, where a church roof had fallen in and killed one hundred and forty people, maiming many more.  The Red-Cross tents were pitched in the streets and the whole town was one vast hospital.  Ottajano, a little nearer to the volcano, had been buried in scoria, and nine-tenths of the roofs had fallen in, rendering the dwellings untenable.

From here a clear view of Mt.  Vesuvius could be obtained.  The shape of the mountain had greatly altered and the cone had lost sixty-five feet of its altitude.  But when one gazed upon the enormous bulk of volcanic deposit that littered the country for miles around, it seemed to equal a dozen mountains the size of Vesuvius.  The marvel was that so much ashes and cinders could come from a single crater in so short a period.

Naples was cleaning house, but slowly and listlessly.  The people seemed as cheerful and light-hearted as ever.  The volcano was one of their crosses, and they bore it patiently.  The theatres would remain closed for some weeks to come, but the great Museo Nationale was open, and Uncle John and his nieces were much interested in the bronze and marble statuary that here form the greatest single collection in all the world.