And
it was anything but conventional to hear one friend shout to another,
"Don't pay a lira for those mandarins; I got twice that many from this
pirate!" And then the five minutes would be up, and the guard would
come along and call "Pronto," which is much prettier than "All
aboard," but which means about the same thing; and then two
ear-splitting whistles and a jangling of bells, and the doors would
slam, and we were off again.
It was moonlight when we skirted the Bay of Naples--the same moonlight
which lighted the Acropolis for us at Athens, which shed its silver
loveliness upon the Adriatic Sea, where we had no one whose soul
shared its beauty with us, and which we found again glittering upon
the Bay of Naples. We stood at the car-window and watched it for an
hour, for all that time our train was winding its way around the shore
into Naples.
That curve of the shore, that sheet of rippling sapphire, the glint of
the moon on the water, the train trailing its slow length around the
bay, are associated in my mind with one of those emotional upheavals
which travellers must often experience in passing from one phase of
civilization to another.
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