sealed up the Grotta Azzurra for that day. I
pictured the pleasure-seekers scattered about
the heated deck, each dejectedly munching



98 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

his Dead Sea apple of disappointment. The
steamer was evidently getting under way again,
for the thread of smoke had swollen into a
black, knotted cable. Presently a faint whistle
came across the water as if a ghost were
whistling somewhere in the distance and the
vessel went puffing away towards Castellamare.
If the Emperor Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar
could have looked down just then from the
cloudy battlements of Capri, what would he
have thought of that !

The great squares of shadow cast upon the
street by the hotel and the adjoining buildings
were deepening by degrees. Fitful puffs of air
came up from the bay the early precursors
of that refreshing breeze which the Mediterra-
nean sends to make the summer twilights of
Naples delicious. Now and then a perfume
was wafted to the balcony, as if the wind had
stolen a handful of scents from some high-
walled enclosure of orange-trees and acacias,
and flung it at me. The white villas, set in
their mosaic of vines on the distant hillside,
had a cooler look than they wore earlier in the
day. The heat was now no longer oppressive,
but it made one drowsy that and the sea air.
An hour or more slipped away from me una-
wares. Meanwhile, the tide of existence had
risen so imperceptibly at my feet that I was



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 99

surprised, on looking down, suddenly to find
the strada flooded with streams of carriages
and horsemen and pedestrians. All the gay
life of Naples, that had lain dormant through
the heavy noon, had awakened, like the princess
in the enchanted palace, to take up the laugh
where it left off and order fresh ices at the
cafes.

I had a feeling that Masaniello he was still
there was somehow at the bottom of all this ;
that by some diablerie of his, may be with the
narcotic fumes of that black cigar, he had
thrown the city into the lethargy from which it
was now recovering.

The crowd, which flowed in two opposing
currents past the hotel, was a gayer and more
smartly dressed throng than that of the morn-
ing. Certain shabby aspects, however, were
not wanting, for donkey-carts mingled them-
selves jauntily with the more haughty equipages
on their way to the Riviera di Chiaia, the popu-
lar drive. There were beautiful brown women,
with heavy-fringed eyes, in these carriages, and
occasionally a Neapolitan dandy a creature
sui generis rode alongside on horseback.
Every human thing that can scrape a vehicle
together goes to the Riviera di Chiaia of a fine
afternoon. It is a magnificent wide avenue,
open on one side to the bay, and lined on the



too FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

other with palaces and villas and hotels. The
road leads to the Grotto of Posilippo, and to
endless marvels beyond the tomb of Virgil,
Lake Avernus, Baiae, Cumae, a Hellenic region
among whose ruins wander the sorrowful shades
of the gods. But the afternoon idler is not
likely to get so far ; after a turn or two on the
promenade, he is content to sit under the trees
in the garden of the Villa Nazionale, sipping
his sherbet dashed with snow, and listening to
the band.

I saw more monks this day than I met in a
week at Rome, their natural headquarters ; but
in Naples, as in the Eternal City, they are gen-
erally not partial to busy thoroughfares. I think
some religious festival must have been going on
in a church near the Chiatamone. A solemn,
dark-robed figure gliding in and out among the
merry crowd had a queer, pictorial effect, and
gave me an incongruous twelfth-century sort of
sensation. Once a file of monks I do not
remember ever seeing so many together out-
side a convent passed swiftly under the bal-
cony. I was near tumbling into the Middle
Ages, when their tonsured heads reminded me
of that row of venerable elderly gentlemen one t
always sees in the front orchestra chairs at the
ballet, and I was thus happily dragged back
into my own cycle.



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 101

It was a noisy, light-hearted, holiday people
that streamed through the strada in the waning
sunshine ; they required no policeman, as a simi-
lar crowd in England or America would have
done ; their merriment was as harmless as that
of so many birds, though no doubt there was
in these laughing throngs plenty of the danger-
ous stuff out of which graceful brigands and
picturesque assassins are made. But it was
easier and pleasanter to discover here and there
a face or a form such as the old masters loved
to paint. I amused myself in selecting models
for new pictures by Titian and Raphael and
Carlo Dolci and Domenichino, to take the
places of those madonnas and long-tressed mis-
tresses of which nothing will remain in a few
centuries. What will Italy be when she has
lost her masterpieces, as she has lost the art
that produced them ? To-day she is the land
of paintings, without any painters, the empty
cradle of poets.

I do not know that anything in the lively
street entertained me more than the drivers of
the public carriages. Like all the common
Neapolitans, the Jehus have a wonderful gift of
telegraphing with their fingers. It is not a
question of words laboriously spelled out, but
of a detailed statement in a flash. They seem
to be able to do half an hour's talking in a cou-



102 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

pie of seconds. A fillip of the finger-joint, and
there 's a sentence for you as long as one of
Mr. Carlyle's. At least, that is my idea of it ;
it is merely conjecture on my part, for though
I have frequently formed the topic of a conversa-
tion carried on in this style under my very nose,
I never succeeded in overhearing anything. I
have undoubtedly been anathematized, and
barely probable, been complimented; but in
those instances, like Horatio, I took fortune's
buffets and rewards with equal thanks. It is
diverting to see two of these fellows meeting
at a breakneck pace and exchanging verdicts on
their respective passengers. May be one, with
a gesture like lightning, says : " I 've a rich
English milor ; he has n't asked for my tariff ;
I shall bleed him beautifully, per Bacco ! ' At
the same instant the other possibly hurls back :
" No such luck ! A pair of foolish Americani,
but they 've a pig of a courier who pockets all
the buonamano himself, the devil fly away with
him ! ' Thus they meet, and indulge in their
simple prattle, and are out of each other's sight,
all in the twinkling of an eye.

in

The twilights in Southern Italy fall suddenly,
and are of brief duration. While I was watch-
ing the darkening shadow of the hotel on the



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 103

opposite sea-wall, the dusk closed in, and the
street began rapidly to empty itself. A curtain
of mist was already stretched from headland
to headland, shutting out the distant objects.
Here and there on a jutting point a light blos-
somed, its duplicate giassed in the water, as if
the fiery flower had dropped a petal. Presently
there were a hundred lights, and then a thou-
sand, fringing the crescented shore.

On our leaving Rome, the landlord had pa-
thetically warned us of the fatal effects of the
night air in Naples, just as our Neapolitan host,
at a later date, let fall some disagreeable hints
about the Roman malaria. They both were
right. In this delicious land Death shrouds
himself in the dew and lurks in all gentle
things. The breeze from the bay had a sudden
chill in it now ; the dampness of the atmos-
phere was as heavy as a fine rain. I pushed
back my chair on the balcony, and then I lin-
gered a moment to see the moon rising over
Capri. Then I saw how that bay, with its
dreadful mountain, was lovelier than anything
on earth. I turned from it reluctantly, and
as I glanced into the silent street beneath,
there was Masaniello, a black silhouette against
the silvery moonlight.



VII

SMITH

AN old acquaintance of mine, who has gone
away into the dark with all his mirthful sayings,
once described an English servant as "the
valet of the Shadow of Death." The mot was
said not to be original with my friend, but I
have heard so many brilliant things from those
same lips that I do not care to go further in
search of an owner for what is sufficiently char-
acteristic of him to be his. Whoever first said
it gave us in a single phrase the most perfect
croquis that ever was made of the English serv-
ing-man. We all know him in the English
novel of the period, and some of us know him
in the flesh. I chance myself to be familiar
with a mild form of him. I speak of him as if
he were a disease : in his most aggravated type
I should say he might be considered as an afflic-
tion. Thackeray the satirist and biographer,
the Pope and Plutarch, of Jeemes frankly
admitted he was afraid of the creature. That
kindly keen blue eye, which saw through the



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 105

shams and follies of Mayfair, was wont to
droop under the stony stare of his host's butler.
I hasten to confess to only a limited personal
knowledge of the august being in plush small-
clothes and pink silk stockings who presides
over the grand houses in England, for I car-
ried my pilgrim's wallet into few grand houses
there ; but I have had more or less to do with
certain humble brothers of his, who are lead-
ing lives of highly respectable gloom in sundry
English taverns and hotels.

It is one of these less dazzling brothers who
furnishes me with the motif 'of this brief study.
More fortunate than that Roman emperor who
vainly longed to have all his enemies consoli-
dated into a single neck, I have secured in a
person named Smith the epitome of an entire
class not, indeed, with the cruel intent of
despatching him, but of photographing him. I
should decline to take Smith's head by any less
gentle method.

In London there is a kind of hotel of which
we have no counterpart in the United States.
This hotel is usually located in some semi-
aristocratic side street, and wears no badge of
its servitude beyond a large, well-kept brass
door-plate, bearing the legend "Jones's Hotel '
or "Brown's Hotel," as the case may be ; but
be it Brown or Jones, he has been dead at least



106 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

fifty years, and the establishment is conducted
by Robinson. There is no coffee-room or pub-
lic dining-room, or even office, in this hotel ;
the commercial traveller is an unknown quan-
tity here ; your meals are served in your
apartments ; the furniture is solid and com-
fortable, the attendance admirable, the cuisine
unexceptionable, and the bill abominable. But
for ease, quietness, and a sort of 1812 odor of
respectability, this hotel has nothing to compare
with it in the wide world. 1 It is here that the
intermittent homesickness you contracted on
the Continent will be lifted out of your bosom ;
it is here will be unfolded to you alluring vistas
of the substantial comforts that surround the
private lives of prosperous Britons ; it is here,
above all, that you will be brought in contact
with Smith.

It was on our arrival in London, one April
afternoon, that the door of what looked like a
private mansion, in Dover Street, was thrown
open to us by a boy broken out all over with
buttons. Behind this boy stood Smith. I call
him simply Smith for two reasons : in the first
place because it is convenient to do so, and in

1 The particular hotel here in question has since died of
too much success. It has blossomed out with electric lights
and every sort of modern improvement, and seclusion knows it
no more.



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 107

the second place because that is what he called
himself. I wish it were as facile a matter to
explain how this seemingly unobtrusive person
instantly took possession of us, bullied us with
his usefulness, and knocked us down with
his urbanity. From the moment he stepped
forward to relieve us of our hand-luggage, we
were his and remained his until that other
moment, some weeks later, when he handed us
our parcels again, and stood statuesque on the
doorstep, with one finger lifted to his forehead
in decorous salute, as we drove away. Ah,
what soft despotism was that which was exer-
cised for no other end than to anticipate our
requirements to invent new wants for us
only to satisfy them ! If I anywhere speak
lightly of Smith, if I take exception to his pre-
ternatural gravity (of which I would not have
him moult a feather), if I allude invidiously
to his lifelong struggle with certain rebellious
letters of the alphabet, it is out of sheer envy
and regret that we have nothing like him in
America. We have Niagara, and the Yosemite,
and many another notable thing, but we have
no trained serving-men like Smith. He is the
result of older and vastly more complex social
conditions than ours. His training began in
the feudal ages. An atmosphere charged with
machicolated battlements and cathedral spires



io8 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

was necessary to his perfect development
that, and generation after generation of lords
and princes and wealthy country-gentlemen for
him to practice on. He is not possible in New
England. The very cut of his features is un-
known among us. It has been remarked that
each trade and profession has its physiognomy,
its own proper face. If you look closely you
will detect a family likeness running through
the portraits of Garrick and Kean and Edwin
Booth and Irving. There 's the self-same
sabre-like flash in the eye of Marlborough and
Bonaparte the same resolute labial expres-
sion. Every lackey in London might be the
son or brother of any other lackey. Smith's
father, and his father's father, and so on back
to the gray dawn of England, were serving-men,
and each in turn has been stamped with the
immutable trade-mark of his class. Waiters
(like poets) are born, not made ; and they have
not had time to be born in America.

As a shell that has the care of enclosing a
pearl like Smith, Jones's Hotel demands a word
or two of more particular description. The
narrow little street in which it is situated
branches off from a turbulent thoroughfare,
and is quite packed with historical, social, and
literary traditions. Here, at the close of his
days, dwelt the learned and sweet-minded



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 109

philosopher, John Evelyn, the contemporary
and friend of everybody's friend, Mr. Samuel
Pepys, of the admiralty. I like to think of
Evelyn turning out of busy Piccadilly into this
more quiet precinct, accompanied, perhaps, by
the obsequious Samuel himself. According to
Jesse, the witty Dr. Arbuthnot also resided
here, after the death of his royal patroness,
Queen Anne, had driven him from his snug
quarters in St. James's Palace. Hither came
Pope, Swift, Gray, Parnell, Prior, and a flock
of other singing-birds and brilliant wits to visit
the worthy doctor. As I sit of an evening in
our parlor, which is on a level with the side-
walk, the ghostly echo of those long-silent foot-
falls is more distinct to my ear than the tread
of the living passers-by. The earthly abiding
places of obsolete notabilities are very thick in
this neighborhood. A few minutes' walk brings
one to the ugly walled mansion that once held
the beauty, but could not hold all the radiance,
of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and a little
farther on is Apsley House.

But we need not wander. Dover Street still
has high pretensions of its own. I take it that
several families whose consequence is to be
found in Debrett's Peerage have their town
houses here. Over the sculptured doorway of
a sombre edifice which sets somewhat back



no FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

behind a towering iron grille with gilded spear-
heads, I have noticed a recently hung hatch-
ment an intimation that death is no respecter
of English nobility. At the curbstone of a
spacious, much-curtained mansion directly op-
posite the hotel, there is a constant arrival
and departure of broughams and landaus, with
armorial blazons and powdered footmen. From
these carriages descend bewitching slips of
English maidenhood with peach-bloom com-
plexions, and richly dressed, portly dowagers
shod with perfectly flat-soled shoes. But I con-
fess that the periodical rattling by of a little
glazed cart lettered " Scarlet the Butcher '
interests me more ; for no mortal reason, I sup-
pose, except that Scarlet seems a phenomenally
appropriate name for a gentleman in his line of
business.

I am afraid my description of Jones's Hotel is
very like one of those old Spanish comedies

" In which you see,

As Lope says, the history of the world,
Brought down from Genesis to the Day of Judgment."

The building itself, arguing from the thick-
ness of the walls and the antiquated style of
the interior woodwork, must have stood its
ground a great many years. I do not know
how long it has been a hotel ; perhaps for the
better part of a century. In the first instance



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH in

it was doubtless the home of some titled family.
I indulge the fancy that there was a lot of lovely,
high-bred daughters, who drew gay company
here. The large, lofty-studded rooms were
meant for an opulent, hospitable kind of life
to inhabit them. Opening on the wide hall
where Buttons is always sitting, a perfect
young Cerberus, waiting for the door-bell to
ring is a small dressing-cabinet, in which, I
make no question, his lordship has many a time
sworn like a pirate over the extravagance of
the girls. I know he has discharged the butler
there. A fitful, evasive odor, as of faded rose-
leaves, in a forgotten drawer, seems to linger
in these chambers, and I think there are hints
in the air of old-time laughter and of sobs that
have long since hushed themselves into silence.
The parlor is full of suggestions to me, espe-
cially at twilight, before the candles are brought
in. Sometimes I can almost hear a muffled,
agitated voice murmuring out of the Past,
" Leave me, Bellamore ! ' and I have an im-
pression that he did n't leave her. How could
he, with those neat diamond buckles glistening
at her instep, and her pretty brown hair frosted
with silver powder, and that distracting dot of
court-plaster stuck near the left corner of her
rosy mouth ! The old walls are very discreet,
not to say incommunicative, on this subject ; it






112 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

is not for them to betray the joys and sorrows
and sins of yesterday, and I have to evolve
these matters out of my own synthetic imagi-
nation. But I am certain that Bellamore did n't
leave her !

Overhead there are suites of apartments
identical with our own, and I believe they are
occupied by serious-minded families of phan-
toms ; they come and go so softly. There is
no loud talking on the staircase, no slamming
of doors, no levity of any description among
the inmates of this hostelry. Whoever comes
here finds his nature subdued to the color of
his surroundings, like the dyer's hand. The
wildest guest shortly succumbs to the soothing
influence of Smith. He pervades the place
like an atmosphere, and fits it so perfectly that,
without jarring on the present, he seems a fig-
ure projected out of that dusky past which has
lured me too long, and will catch me again be-
fore we get through.

Smith is a man of about forty, but so unas-
suming that I do not think he would assume
to be so old or so young as that : tall and
straight, with scant, faded brown hair parted in
the middle, and a deferential cough ; clammy
blue eyes, thin lips, a sedentary complexion,
and careful side-whiskers. He is always in
evening dress, and wears white cotton gloves,



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 113

which set your teeth on edge, during dinner
service. He is a person whose gravity of de-
portment is such as to lend seriousness to the
coal-scuttle when he replenishes the parlor fire
a ceremony which the English April makes
imperative, the English April being as raw as
an American February.

Smith's respect for you, at least its outward
manifestation, is accompanied by a deep, unex-
pressed respect for himself. He not only knows
his own place, but he knows yours, and holds
you to it. He is incapable of venturing on a
familiarity, or of submitting to one. He can
wrap up more pitying disapprobation in a
scarcely perceptible curl of his nether lip than
another man could express in a torrent of words.
I have gone about London a whole forenoon
with one of Smith's thin smiles clinging like a
blister to my consciousness. He is not taci-
turn, but he gives you the impression of uncon-
querable reserve. Though he seldom speaks,
except to answer an inquiry, he has managed
in some occult fashion to permeate us with a
knowledge of his domestic environment. For
the soul of me, I cannot say how I came by
the information that Smith married Lady Hade-
laide Scarborough's first maid twelve years ago,
nor in what manner I got hold of the idea that
Lady Hadelaide Scarborough's first maid rather



114 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

stooped from her social status when she formed
a matrimonial alliance with him. Yet these
facts are undeniably in my possession. I also
understand that Smith regards Mrs. Smith
who quitted service at the time of this mesal-
liance as a sort of fragment (a little finger-
joint, if that will help convey my meaning) of
Lady Hadelaide herself. There's an air of
very good society about Smith. He evidently
has connecting tendrils with beings who, if they
are not roses themselves, have the privilege
of constituting the dust at the roses' feet. If
Smith were to make any statement to me con-
cerning the movements of Royalty, I should
believe him. If he were to confide to me that
Her Majesty, accompanied by the Princess
Beatrice, walked for a few seconds yesterday
afternoon on the terrace at Windsor, I should
know it was so, even if I failed to see the event
recorded in The Times.

Smith has been very near to Royalty. To
be sure, it was fallen royalty, so I shall waste
no capital letters on it. It fell at Sedan, and
picked itself up in a manner, and came over to
London, where Smith had the bliss of waiting
upon it. " The H emperor was a very civil-
spoken gentleman," observed Smith, detailing
the circumstances with an air of respectful pa-
tronage, and showing that he had a nice sense



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 115

of the difference between an English sovereign
and an uncurrent napoleon.

The plain truth is that Smith is an arrant
gossip about himself without in the least hav-
ing the appearance of it. He so ingeniously
embroiders bits of his autobiography on alien
textures that one is apt to get a detail or two
quite unawares. I do not know how or when
six little Smiths glided into my intelligence
(they cost me a shilling a head), but I think it
was in connection with an inquiry on my part
as to what hour the morning train left Pad-
dington Station for Stratford-upon-Avon. Two
nights out of the week Smith retires to his
domestic domicile ; situated, I infer, in some
remote suburb of London, for he always takes
a bag with him a respectable, drab-colored
hand-bag, with a monogram on it. At a little
distance the twisted initials, in raised worsted,
resemble a reduced copy of the Laocoon, the
prominent serpentine S having, I suspect, no
small share in producing that effect. I some-
how pose and mix up the six little Smiths in
this monogram.

I have said that Smith took possession of
our party immediately on its arrival at Jones's
Hotel, but we were not at once conscious of
the fact. We had arrived there in high spirits,
glad to have left a tedious sea-voyage behind



n6 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

us, and rejoiced to find ourselves in London
the London we had dreamed of these ten or
twenty years. But presently we felt there was
something in the temperature that chilled our
vivacity. We were a thousand miles from sus-
pecting what it was. Our purpose in London
was to see the sights, to visit all those historic
buildings and monuments and galleries which
were wrested from us by the war of 1776. Our
wanderings through the day were often long
and always fatiguing ; we returned jaded to the
hotel, frequently after the dinner hour, and
in no mood to undertake radical changes in
our costume. There stood Smith in his crisp
necktie and claw-hammer coat and immaculate
gloves. The dinner was elegant in its appoint-
ments, and exquisitely served. The dressing
of the salad was rivalled only by the dressing
of Smith. Yet something was wrong. We
were somehow repressed, and for three days
we did not know what it was that repressed us.
On the fourth day I resolved to give our party