To reach Pompeii from Naples we followed a somewhat roundabout route; and that trip was distinctly worth while too.  It provided a most pleasing foretaste of what was to come.  Once we had cleared the packed and festering suburbs, we went flanking across a terminal vertebra of the mountain range that sprawls lengthwise of the land of Italy, like a great spiny-backed crocodile sunning itself, with its tail in the Tyrrhenian Sea and its snout in the Piedmonts; and when we had done this we came out on a highway that skirted the bay.

There were gaps in the hills, through which we caught glimpses of the city, lying miles away in its natural amphitheater; and at that distance we could revel in its picturesqueness and forget its bouquet of weird stenches.  We could even forget that the automobile we had hired for the excursion had one foot in the grave and several of its most important vital organs in the repair shop.  I reckon that was the first automobile built.  No; I take that back.  It never was a first—­it must have been a second to start with.

I once owned a half interest in a sick automobile.  It was one of those old-fashioned, late Victorian automobiles, cut princesse style, with a plaquette in the back; and it looked like a cross between a fiat-bed job press and a tailor’s goose.  It broke down so easily and was towed in so often by more powerful machines that every time a big car passed it on the road it stopped right where it was and nickered.  Of a morning we would start out in that car filled with high hopes and bright anticipations, but eventide would find us returning homeward close behind a bigger automobile, in a relationship strongly suggestive of the one pictured in the well-known Nature Group entitled:  “Mother Hippo, With Young.”  We refused an offer of four hundred dollars for that machine.  It had more than four hundred dollars’ worth of things the matter with it.

The car we chartered at Naples for our trip to Pompeii reminded me very strongly of that other car of which I was part owner.  Between them there was a strong family resemblance, not alone in looks but in deportment also.  For patient endurance of manifold ills, for an inexhaustible capacity in developing new and distressing symptoms at critical moments, for cheerful willingness to play foal to some other car’s dam, they might have been colts out of the same litter.  Nevertheless, between intervals of breaking down and starting up again, and being helped along by friendly passer-by automobiles, we enjoyed the ride from Naples.  We enjoyed every inch of it.