Nearly all the hotels in Italy are converted palaces.  They may have been successes as palaces, but, with their marble floors and their high ceilings, and their dank, dark corridors, they distinctly fail to qualify as hotels.  I should have preferred them remaining unsaved and sinful.  I likewise observed a peculiarity common to hotelkeepers in Italy—­they all look like cats.  The proprietor of the converted palace where we stopped in Naples was the very image of a tomcat we used to own, named Plutarch’s Lives, which was half Maltese and half Mormon.  He was a cat that had a fine carrying voice—­though better adapted for concert work than parlor singing—­and a sweetheart in every port.  This hotelkeeper might have been the cat’s own brother with clothes on—­he had Plute’s roving eye and his bristling whiskers and his sharp white teeth, and Plute’s silent, stealthy tread, and his way of purring softly until he had won your confidence and then sticking his claw into you.  The only difference was, he stuck you with a bill instead of a claw.

Another interesting idiosyncrasy of the Italian hotelkeeper is that he invariably swears to you his town is the only honest town in Italy, but begs you to beware of the next town which, he assures you with his hand on the place where his heart would be if he had a heart, is full of thieves and liars and counterfeit money and pickpockets.  Half of what he tells you is true—­the latter half.

The tourist agencies issue pamphlets telling how you may send money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy, and then append a footnote warning you against sending money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy.  Likewise you are constantly being advised against carrying articles of value in your trunk, unless it is most carefully locked, bolted and strapped.  It is good advice too.

An American I met on the boat coming home told me he failed to take such precautions while traveling in Italy; and he said that when he reached the Swiss border his trunk was so light he had to sit on it to keep it from blowing off the bus on the way from the station to the hotel, and so empty that when he opened it at both ends the draft whistling through it gave him a bad cold.  However, he may have exaggerated slightly.

If you can forget that you are paying first-class prices for fourth-rate accommodations—­forget the dirt in the carriages and the smells in the compartments—­a railroad journey through the Italian Peninsula is a wonderful experience.  I know it was a wonderful experience for me.

I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously on the sloping withers of razorbacked mountains—­towns that were old when the Saviour was born; or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all pocked and pecked with age, looping their arches across the land for miles on miles; or the fields, scored and scarified by three thousand years of unremitting, relentless, everlasting agriculture; or the wide-horned Italian cattle that browsed in those fields; or yet the woman who darted to the door of every signal-house we passed and came to attention, with a long cudgel held flat against her shoulder like a sentry’s musket.