“I remember,” said Mr. Mafferton.  “All the luxuries of the coming season, printed on a card usually about a foot long.  A great variety, and very difficult to understand.  When I had finished trying to translate the morning paper, I used to attack the card.  I found that it threw quite a light upon early American civilisation from the aboriginal side.  ‘Hominy,’ ‘Grits,’ ‘Buckwheats,’ ‘Cantelopes,’ are some of the dishes I remember.  ‘Succotash,’ too, and ‘creamed squash,’ but I think they occurred at dinner generally.  I used to summon the waiter, and when he came to take my orders I would ask him to derive those dishes.  I had great difficulty after a time in summoning a waiter.  But the plan gave me many interesting half hours.  In the end I usually ordered a chop.”

“I don’t want to run down your politics,” poppa said, “but that’s what I call being too conservative.  Augusta, if you have had enough of the Bay of Naples and the moon, I might remind you of the buried city of Pompeii, which is on for to-morrow.  It’s a good long way out, and you’ll want all your powers of endurance.  I’m going down to have a smoke, and a look at the humorous publications of Italy.  There’s no sort of sociability about these hotels, but the head portier knows a little English.”

“I suppose I had better retire,” momma admitted, “though I sometimes wish Mr. Wick wasn’t so careful of my nervous system.  Delicious scene, good-night.”  And she too left us.

We were sitting in a narrow balcony that seemed to jut out of a horn of the city’s lovely crescent.  Dicky and Isabel occupied chairs at a distance nicely calculated to necessitate a troublesome raising of the voice to communicate with them.  Mrs. Portheris was still confined to her room with what was understood to be the constitutional shock of her experiences in the Catacombs.  Dicky, in joyful privacy, assured me that nobody could recover from a combination of Roman tallow and French kid in less than a week, but I told him he did not know the British constitution.

[Illustration:  We were sitting in a narrow balcony.]

The moon sailed high over Naples, and lighted the lapping curve of her perfect bay in the deepest, softest blue, and showed us some of the nearer houses of the city, sloping and shouldering and creeping down, that they were pink and yellow and parti-coloured, while the rest curved and glimmered round the water in all tender tones of white holding up a thousand lamps.  And behind, curving too, the hills stood clear, with the grey phantom of Vesuvius in sharp familiar lines, sending up its stream of steady red, and now and then a leaping flame.  It was a scene to wake the latent sentiment of even a British bosom.  I thought I would stay a little longer.

“So you usually ordered a chop?” I said by way of resuming the conversation.  “I hope the chops were tender.”

(I have a vague recollection that my intonation was.)