of the background of crimson clouds and blue and gold sky, spread out there and hung there in royal and extravagant profusion, to make a highway and a regal gateway, through which I could just then see coming the horses and the chariot of a southern perfect day.  They said that the tree-shaped cloud was the sign of an eruption; but the hotel-keepers here are always predicting that.  The eruption is usually about two or three weeks distant; and the hotel proprietors get this information from experienced guides, who observe the action of the water in the wells; so that there can be no mistake about it.

We took carriages at nine o’clock to Resina, a drive of four miles, and one of exceeding interest, if you wish to see Naples life.  The way is round the curving bay by the sea; but so continuously built up is it, and so inclosed with high walls of villas, through the open gates of which the golden oranges gleam, that you seem never to leave the city.  The streets and quays swarm with the most vociferous, dirty, multitudinous life.  It is a drive through Rag Fair.  The tall, whitey-yellow houses fronting the water, six, seven, eight stories high, are full as beehives; people are at all the open windows; garments hang from the balconies and from poles thrust out; up every narrow, gloomy, ascending street are crowds of struggling human shapes; and you see how like herrings in a box are packed the over half a million people of Naples.  In front of the houses are the markets in the open air,—­fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets; and rows of children who were never washed and never clothed but once, and whose garments have nearly wasted away; beggars, fishermen in red caps, sailors, priests, donkeys, fruit-venders, street-musicians, carriages, carts, two-wheeled break-down vehicles,—­the whole tangled in one wild roar and rush and babel,—­a shifting, varied panorama of color, rags,—­a pandemonium such as the world cannot show elsewhere, that is what one sees on the road to Resina.  The drivers all drive in the streets here as if they held a commission from the devil, cracking their whips, shouting to their horses, and dashing into the thickest tangle with entire recklessness.  They have one cry, used alike for getting more speed out of their horses or for checking them, or in warning to the endangered crowds on foot.  It is an exclamatory grunt, which may be partially expressed by the letters “a-e-ugh.”  Everybody shouts it, mule-driver, “coachee,” or cattle-driver; and even I, a passenger, fancied I could do it to disagreeable perfection after a time.  Out of this throng in the streets I like to select the meek, patient, diminutive little donkeys, with enormous panniers that almost hide them.  One would have a woman seated on top, with a child in one pannier and cabbages in the other; another, with an immense stock of market-greens on his back, or big baskets of oranges, or with a row of wine-casks and a man