tions from Americans to attend this reception,
but his Holiness just at present is not inclined
to receive many Americans."
"Why not?"
" A few weeks ago, his Holiness was treated
with great disrespect by an American, a lawyer
from one of your Western States, I believe,
who did not rise from his seat or kneel when
the Pope entered the room."
"He ought to have risen, certainly ; but is it
imperative that one should kneel ? '
" It is ; but then, it is not imperative on any
one to be presented to his Holiness. If the
gentleman did not wish to conform to the cus-
tom, he ought to have stayed away."
"He might have been ignorant of that phase
of the ceremony," said I, with a sudden poign-
ant sense of sympathy with my unhappy coun-
tryman. " What befell him ? "
" He was courteously escorted from the
chamber by the gentleman in waiting," said
Signor V , glancing at an official near the
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 61
door, who looked as if he were a cross between
a divinity student and a policeman.
It occurred to me that few things would be
less entertaining than to be led out of this
audience-chamber in the face and eyes of
France, Germany, Russia, and Italy in the
face and eyes of the civilized world, in fact ;
for would not the next number of Galignani's
Messenger have a paragraph about it ? I had
supposed that Catholics knelt to the Pope, as
a matter of course, but that Protestants were
exempt from paying this homage, on the same
ground that Quakers are not expected to re-
move their hats like other folk. I wondered
what Friend Eli would do, if destiny dropped
him into the midst of one of the receptions of
Pius IX. However, it was somewhat late to
go to the bottom of the matter, so I dismissed
it from my mind, and began an examination of
my neighbors.
A cynic has observed that all cats are gray
in the twilight. He said cats, but meant wo-
men. I am convinced that all women are not
alike in a black silk dress, very simply trimmed
and with no color about it except a white rose
at the corsage. There are women perhaps
not too many whose beauty is heightened
by an austere toilet. Such a one was the lady
opposite me, with her veil twisted under her
62 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
chin and falling negligently over the left
shoulder. The beauty of her face flashed out
like a diamond from its sombre setting. She
had the brightest of dark eyes, with such a
thick, long fringe of dark eyelashes that her
whole countenance turned into night when she
drooped her eyelids ; when she lifted them, it
was morning again. As if to show us what
might be done in the manner of contrasts, Na-
ture had given this lady some newly coined
Roman gold for hair. I think Eve was that
way both blonde and brunette. My vis-a-vis
would have been gracious in any costume, but I
am positive that nothing would have gone so
well with her as the black silk dress, fitting
closely to the pliant bust and not losing a sin-
gle line or curve. As she sat, turned three
quarters face, the window behind her threw
the outlines of her slender figure into sharp
relief. The lady herself was perfectly well
aware of it.
Next to this charming person was a substan-
tial English matron, who wore her hair done up
in a kind of turret, and looked like a lithograph
of a distant view of Windsor Castle. She sat
bolt upright, and formed, if I may say so, the
initial letter of a long line of fascinatingly ugly
women. Imagine a row of Sphinxes in deep
mourning. It would have been an unbroken
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 63
line of feminine severity, but for a handsome
young priest with a strikingly spiritual face,
who came in, like a happy word in parenthesis,
halfway down the row. I soon exhausted the
resources of this part of the room ; my eyes
went back to the Italian lady so prettily framed
in the embrasure of the window, and would
have lingered there had I not got interested in
an old gentleman seated on my left. When he
came into the room, blinking his kindly blue
eyes and rubbing his hands noiselessly together
and beaming benevolently on everybody, just as
if he were expected, I fell in love with him.
His fragile, aristocratic hands appeared to have
been done up by the same blanchisseuse who
did his linen, which was as white and crisp as
an Alpine snow-drift, as were also two wintry
strands of hair artfully trained over either ear.
Otherwise he was as bald and shiny as a gla-
cier. He seated himself with an old-fashioned,
courteous bow to the company assembled and
a protesting wave of the hand, as if to say,
" Good people, I pray you, do not disturb your-
selves," and made all that side of the room
bright with his smiling. He looked so clean
and sweet, just such a wholesome figure as one
would like to have at one's fireside as grand-
father, that I began formulating the wish that
I might, thirty or forty years hence, be taken
64 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
for his twin brother ; when a neighbor of his
created a disturbance.
This neighbor was a young Italian lady or
gentleman I cannot affirm which of per-
haps ten months' existence, who up to the
present time had been asleep in the arms of its
bonne. Awaking suddenly, the bambino had
given vent to the shrillest shrieks, impelled
thereto by the strangeness of the surrounding
features, or perhaps by some conscientious
scruples about being in the Vatican. I picked
out the mother at once by the worried expres-
sion that flew to the countenance of a lady
near me, and in a gentleman who instantly as-
sumed an air of having no connection whatever
with the baleful infant, I detected the father.
I do not remember to have seen a stronger in-
stance of youthful depravity and duplicity than
that lemon-colored child afforded. The mo-
ment the nurse walked with it, it sunk into the
sweetest of slumber, and peace settled upon its
little nose like a drowsy bee upon the petal of
a flower ; but the instant the bonne made a
motion to sit down, it broke forth again. I do
not know what ultimately befell the vocal gob-
lin ; possibly it was collared by the lieutenant
of the guard outside, and thrown into the
deepest dungeon of the palace ; at all events it
disappeared after the announcement that his
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 65
Holiness would be with us shortly. Whatever
virtues Pius IX. possessed, punctuality was not
one of them, for he had kept us waiting three
quarters of an hour, and we had still another
fifteen minutes to wait.
The monotonous hum of conversation hushed
itself abruptly, the two sections of the wide
door I have mentioned were thrown open, and
the Pope, surrounded by his cardinals and a
number of foreign princes, entered. The oc-
cupants of the two long settees rose, and then,
as if they were automata worked by the same
tyrannical wire, sunk simultaneously into an
attitude of devotion. For an instant I was
seized with a desperate desire not to kneel.
There is something in an American knee, when
it is rightly constructed, that makes it an awk-
ward thing to kneel with before any man born
of woman. Perhaps, if the choice were left
one, either to prostrate one's self before a 'cer-
tain person or be shot, one might make a point
of it and be shot. But that was not the al-
ternative in the present case. If I had failed
to follow the immemorial custom I should not
have had the honor of a fusillade, but would
have been ignominiously led away by one of
those highly colored Swiss guards, and, in my
dress suit, would have presented to the general
stare the appearance of a pretentious ace of
66 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
spades being wiped out by a gay right-bower.
Such humiliation was not to be thought of.
So, wishing myself safely back amid the cruder
civilization of the New World, and with a men-
tal protest accompanied by a lofty compassion
for the weakness and cowardice of humankind,
I slid softly down with the rest of the miser-
able sinners. I was in the very act, when I
was chilled to the marrow by catching a side-
long glimpse of my benign old gentleman pla-
cidly leaning back in his seat, with his hands
folded over his well-filled waistcoat and that
same benevolent smile petrified on his counte-
nance. He was fast asleep.
Immediately a tall, cadaverous person in a
scant, funereal garment emerged from some-
where, and touched the sleeper on the shoulder.
The old gentleman unclosed his eyes slowly
and with difficulty, and was so far from taking
in the situation that he made a gesture as if to
shake hands with the tall, cadaverous person.
Then it all flashed upon the dear old boy, and
he dropped to his knees with so comical and
despairing an air of contrition that the pre-
sence of forty thousand popes would not have
prevented me from laughing.
Another discomposing incident occurred at
this juncture. Two removes below me was a
smooth-faced German of gigantic stature ; he
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 67
must have been six or seven inches over six feet
in height, but so absurdly short between the
knee-cap and ankle that as he knelt he towered
head and shoulders above us all, resembling a
great, overgrown schoolboy, standing up as
straight as he could. It was so he impressed
one of the ghostly attendants, who advanced
quickly towards him with the evident purpose
of requesting him to kneel. Discovering his
error just in time, the reverend father re-
treated, much abashed.
All eyes were now turned toward the Pope
and his suite, and this trifling episode passed
unnoticed save by two or three individuals in
the immediate neighborhood, who succeeded in
swallowing their smiles, but did not dare glance
at one another afterwards. The Pope advanced
to the centre of the upper end of the room,
leaning heavily on his ivory-handled cane, the
princes in black and the cardinals in scarlet
standing behind him in picturesque groups, like
the chorus in an opera. Indeed, it was all like
a scene on the stage. There was something
premeditated and spectacular about it, as if
these persons had been engaged at high sala-
ries for the occasion. Several of the princes
were Russian, with names quite well adapted
to not being remembered. Among the Italian
gentlemen was Cardinal Nobli Vatteleschi
68 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
he was not a cardinal then, by the way who
has since died.
Within whispering distance of the Pope
stood Cardinal Antonelli a man who would
not escape observation in any assembly of nota-
ble personages. If the Inquisition should be
revived in its early genial form, and the reader
should fall into its hands as would very
likely be the case, if a branch office were es-
tablished in this country he would feel
scarcely comfortable if his chief inquisitor had
so cold and subtle a countenance as Giacomo
Antonelli' s.
We occasionally meet in political or in social
life a man whose presence seems to be an
anachronism a man belonging to a type we
fancied extinct ; he affects us as a living dodo
would the naturalist, though perhaps not with
so great an enthusiasm. Cardinal Antonelli, in
his bearing and the cast of his countenance,
had that air of remoteness which impresses us
in the works of the old masters. I had seen
somewhere a head of Velasquez for which the
cardinal might have posed. With the subdued
afternoon light falling upon him through the
deep-set lunette, he seemed like some cruel
prelate escaped from one of the earlier volumes
of Froude's History of England subtle,
haughty, intolerant. I did not mean to allow
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 69
so sinister an impression to remain on my mind ;
but all I have since read and heard of Cardinal
Antonelli has not obliterated it.
It was a pleasure to turn from the impassible
prime minister to the gentle and altogether
interesting figure of his august master, with his
small, sparkling eyes, remarkably piercing when
he looked at you point-blank, and a smile none
the less winsome that it lighted up a mouth
denoting unusual force of will. His face was
not at all the face of a man who had passed
nearly half a century in arduous diplomatic and
ecclesiastical labors ; it was certainly the face
of a man who had led a temperate, blameless
private life, in noble contrast to many of his
profligate predecessors, whom the world was
only too glad to have snugly stowed away in
their gorgeous porphyry coffins with a marble
mistress carved atop.
Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti was born in
Sinigaglia on the I3th of May, 1792 ; the week
previous to this reception he had celebrated his
eighty-third birthday ; but he did not look over
sixty-five or seventy, as he stood there in his
skull-cap of cream-white broadcloth and his
long pontifical robes of the same material a
costume that lent an appearance of height to an
undersized, stoutly built figure. With his sil-
very hair straggling from beneath the skull-cap,
70 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
and his smoothly shaven pale face, a trifle
heavy, perhaps because of the double chin, he
was a very beautiful old man. After pausing a
moment or two in the middle of the chamber,
and taking a bird's-eye glance at his guests,
the Pope began his rounds. Assigned to each
group of five or ten persons was an official who
presented the visitors by name, indicating their
nationality, station, etc. So far as the nation-
ality was involved, that portion of the introduc-
tion was obviously superfluous, for the Pope
singled out his countrymen at a glance, and at
once addressed them in Italian, scarcely waiting
for the master of ceremonies to perform his
duties. To foreigners his Holiness spoke in
French. After a few words of salutation he
gave his hand to each person, who touched it
with his lips or his forehead, or simply retained
it an instant. It was a deathly cold hand, on
the forefinger of which was a great seal ring
bearing a mottled gray stone that seemed
frozen. As the Pope moved slowly along, devo-
tees caught at the hem of his robe and pressed
it to their lips, and in most instances bowed
down and kissed his feet. I suppose it was
only by years of practice that his Holiness
was able to avoid stepping on a nose here and
there.
It came our turn at last. As he approached
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 71
us he said, with a smile, " Ah, I see you are
Americans." Signer V then presented
us formally, and the Pope was kind enough to
say to us what he had probably said to twenty
thousand other Americans in the course of sev-
eral hundred similar occasions. After he had
passed on, the party that had paid their respects
to him resumed their normal position I am
not sure this was not the most enjoyable fea-
ture of the affair and gave themselves up to
watching the other presentations. When these
were concluded, the Pope returned to the point
of his departure, and proceeded to bless the
rosaries and crosses and souvenirs that had
been brought, in greater or lesser numbers, by
every one. There were salvers piled with rosa-
ries, arms strung from wrist to shoulder with
rosaries so many carven amulets, and circlets
of beads and crucifixes, indeed, that it would
have been the labor of weeks to bless them
separately ; so his Holiness blessed them in
bulk.
It was then that the neat little American
lady who sat next us confirmed my suspicions
as to her brideship by slyly slipping from her
wedding finger a plain gold ring, which she
attached to her rosary with a thread from her
veil. Seeing herself detected in the act, she
turned to Madama, and, making up the most
72 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
piquant little face in the world, whispered con-
fidentially, " Of course I 'm not a Roman
Catholic, you know ; but if there 's anything
efficacious in the blessing, I don't want to lose
it. I want to take all the chances." For my
part, I hope and believe the Pope's blessing
will cling to that diminutive wedding-ring for
many and many a year.
This ceremony finished, his Holiness ad-
dressed to his guests the neatest of farewells,
delivered in enviable French, in which he
wished a prosperous voyage to those pilgrims
whose homes lay beyond the sea, and a happy
return to all. When he touched, as he did
briefly, on the misfortunes of the Church, an
adorable fire came into his eyes ; fifty of his
eighty-three winters slipped from him as if by
enchantment, and for a few seconds he stood
forth in the prime of life. He spoke some five
or seven minutes, and nothing could have been
more dignified and graceful than the matter
and the manner of his words. The benedic-
tion was followed by a general rustle and move-
ment among the princes and eminenze at the
farther end of the room ; the double door
opened softly, and closed and that was the
last the Pope saw of us.
VI
ON A BALCONY
I
A BALCONY, as we northerns know it, is a
humiliating architectural link between indoors
and out of doors. To be on a balcony is to be
nowhere in particular : you are not exactly at
home, and yet cannot be described as out ; your
privacy and your freedom are alike sacrificed.
The approaching bore has you at his mercy ;
he can draw a bead on you with his rifled eye
at a hundred paces. You may gaze abstract-
edly at a cloud, or turn your back, but you can-
not escape him, though the chance is always
open to you to drop a bureau on him as he
lifts his hand to the bell-knob. One could fill
a volume with a condensed catalogue of the
inconveniences of an average balcony. But
when the balcony hangs from the third-story
window of an Old World palace, and when the
fagade of that Old World palace looks upon
the Bay of Naples, you had better think twice
before you speak depreciatingly of balconies.
With that sheet of mysteriously blue water in
74 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
front of you ; with Mount Vesuvius moodily
smoking its perpetual calumet on your left ;
with the indented shore sweeping towards Poz-
zuoli and Baiae on your right ; with Capri and
Ischia notching the ashen gray line of the hori-
zon ; with the tender heaven of May bending
over all with these accessories, I say, it must
be conceded that one might be very much
worse off in this world than on a balcony.
I know that I came to esteem the narrow
iron-grilled shelf suspended from my bedroom
window in the hotel on the Strada Chiatamone
as the choicest spot in all Naples. After a ram-
ble through the unsavory streets it was always
a pleasure to get back to it, and I think I never
in my life did a more sensible thing in the
department of pure idleness than when I re-
solved to spend an entire day on that balcony.
One morning, after an early breakfast, I estab-
lished myself there in an armchair placed be-
side a small table holding a couple of books, a
paper of cigarettes, and a field-glass. My com-
panions had gone to explore the picture-galler-
ies ; but I had my picture-gallery chez moi
in the busy strada below, in the villa-fringed
bay, in the cluster of yellow-roofed little towns
clinging to the purple slopes of Mount Vesu-
vius and patiently awaiting annihilation. The
beauty of Naples lies along its water-front, and
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 75
from my coigne of vantage I had nothing to
desire.
If the Bay of Naples had not been described
a million times during the present century, I
should still not attempt to describe it : I have
made a discovery which no other traveller
seems to have made that its loveliness is
untranslatable. Moreover, enthusiasm is not
permitted to the modern tourist. He may be
aesthetic, or historic, or scientific, or analytic, or
didactic, or any kind of ic, except enthusiastic.
He may be Meissonier-like in his detail ; he
may give you the very tint and texture of a
honeycombed frieze over a Byzantine gateway,
or lay bare the yet faintly palpitating heart of
some old-time tragedy, but he must do it in a
nonchalant, pulseless manner, with a semi-su-
percilious elevation of nostril. He would lose
his self-respect if he were to be deeply moved
by anything, or really interested in anything.
" All that he sees in Bagdad
Is the Tigris to float him away."
He is the very antipode of his elder brother of
fifty years syne, who used to go about filling
his note-book with Thoughts on Standing at
the Tomb of Marcus Antoninus, Emotions on
Finding a Flea on my Shirt Collar in the Val
d'Arno, and the like. The latter-day tourist is
a great deal less innocent, but is he more
;6 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
amusing than those old-fashioned sentimental
travellers who had at least freshness of sym-
pathies and never dreamed of trying to pass
themselves off as cynics ? Dear, ingenuous, im-
pressible souls peace to your books of travel!
May they line none but trunks destined to
prolonged foreign tours, or those thrice happy
trunks which go on bridal journeys !
At the risk of being relegated to the footing
of those emotional ancients, I am going to con-
fess to an unrequited passion for Mount Vesu-
vius. Never was passion less regarded by its
object. I did not aspire to be received with
the warmth of manner that characterized its
reception of the elder Pliny in the year 79, but
I did want Mount Vesuvius to pay me a little
attention, which it might easily have done
without putting itself out. On arriving in town
I had called on Mount Vesuvius. The acquaint-
ance rested there. Every night, after my can-
dle was extinguished, I stood a while at the
open window and glanced half -expectantly across
the bay ; but the sullen monster made no sign.
That slender spiral column of smoke, spread-
ing out like a toadstool on attaining a certain
height, but neither increasing nor diminishing
in volume, lifted itself into the starlight. Some-
times I fancied that the smoke had taken a
deeper lurid tinge ; but it was only fancy. How
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 77
I longed for a sudden burst of flame and sco-
riae from those yawning jaws ! for one awful
instant's illumination of the bay and the ship-
ping and the picturesque villages asleep at the
foot of the mountain ! I did not care to have
the spectacle last more than four or five heart-
beats at the longest ; but it was a thing worth
wishing for.
I do not believe that even the most hardened
traveller is able wholly to throw off the grim
fascination of Mount Vesuvius so long as he is
near it ; and I quite understand the potency of
the spell which has led the poor people of Re-
sina to set up their Lares and Penates on cin-
der-buried Herculaneum. Bide your time, O
Resina, and Portici, and Torre del Greco ! The
doom of Pompeii and Herculaneum shall yet
be yours. " If it be now, 't is not to come ;
if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it be
not now, yet it will come."
Indeed, these villages have suffered repeat-
edly in ancient and modern times. In the
eruption of 1631 seven torrents of lava swept
down the mountain, taking in their course
Bosco, Torre dell' Annunziata, Torre del Greco,
Resina, and Portici, and destroying three thou-
sand lives. That calamity and later though
not so terrible catastrophes have not prevented
the people from rebuilding on the old sites. The
78 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
singular fertility of the soil around the base of
the volcanic pile lures them back or is it that
they are under the influence of that nameless
glamour I have hinted at ? Perhaps those half-
indistinguishable shapes of petrified gnome and
satyr and glyptodon which lie tumbled in heaps
all about this region have something to do with
it. It would be easy to believe that some of
the nightmare figures and landscapes in Dore's
illustrations of The Wandering Jew were sug-
gested to the artist by the fantastic forms in
which the lava streams have cooled along the
flanks of Vesuvius.
A man might spend a busy life in studying
the phenomena of this terrible mountain. It
is undergoing constant changes. The paths to
the crater have to be varied from month to
month, so it is never safe to make the ascent
without a guide. There is a notable sympathy
existing between the volcanoes of Vesuvius and
JEtna, although seventy miles apart ; when one
is in a period of unusual activity, the other, as
a rule, remains quiescent. May be the impri-
soned giant Enceladus works both forges. I
never think of either mountain without recall-
ing Longfellow's poem
" Under Mount /Etna he lies,
It is slumber, it is not death ;
For he struggles at times to arise,
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 79
And above him the lurid skies
Are hot with his fiery breath.
" The crags are piled on his breast,
The earth is heaped on his head ;
But the groans of his wild unrest,
Though smothered and half suppressed,
Are heard, and he is not dead.
" And the nations far away