If, coming forth from a huge and dirty terminal, you emerge on a splendid plaza, miserably paved, and see a priest, a soldier and a beggar; a beautiful child wearing nothing at all to speak of, and a hideous old woman with the eyes of a Madonna looking out of a tragic mask of a face; a magnificent fountain, and nobody using the water, and a great, overpowering smell—­yes, you can see a Roman smell; a cart mule with ten dollars’ worth of trappings on him, and a driver with ten cents’ worth on him; a palace like a dream of stone, entirely surrounded by nightmare hovels; a new, shiny, modern apartment house, and shouldering up against it a cankered rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard’s face with tufted laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard’s with red stains; a church that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin’s Cave of gold and gems and porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the center there stands a statue which is worth its weight in minted silver and which carries more than its weight in dirt—­if in addition everybody in sight is smiling and good-natured and happy, and is trying to sell you something or wheedle you out of something, or pick your pocket of something—­you need not, for confirmatory evidence, seek the vast dome of St. Peter’s rising yonder in the distance, or the green tops of the cedars and the dusky clumps of olive groves on the hillsides beyond—­you know you are in Rome.

To get the correct likeness of Naples we merely reduce the priests by one-half and increase the beggars by two-thirds; we richen the color masses, thicken the dirt, raise the smells to the Nth degree, and set half the populace to singing.  We establish in every second doorway a mother with her offspring tucked between her knees and forcibly held there while the mother searches the child’s head for a flea; anyhow, it is more charitable to say it is a flea; and we add a special touch of gorgeousness to the street pictures.

For here a cart is a glory of red tires and blue shafts, and green hubs and pink body and purple tailgate, with a canopy on it that would have suited Sheba’s Queen; and the mule that draws the cart is caparisoned in brass and plumage like a circus pony; and the driver wears a broad red sash, part of a shirt, and half of a pair of pants—­usually the front half.  With an outfit such as that, you feel he should be peddling aurora borealises, or, at the very least, rainbows.  It is a distinct shock to find he has only chianti or cheeses or garbage in stock.

In Naples, also, there is, even in the most prosaic thing, a sight to gladden your eye if you but hold your nose while you look on it.  On the stalls of the truckvenders the cauliflowers and the cabbages are racked up with an artistic effect we could scarcely equal if we had roses and orchids to work with; the fishmonger’s cart is a study in still life, and the tripe is what artists call a harmonious interior.