In The Effect, Art And Nature Combined To
Neutralize Each Other, As They Do With Us, For Instance, In Those
Restaurants Where They Have Music During Dinner, And Where You Do Not
Know Whether You Are Eating The _Chef-D'oeuvre_ Of A Cook Or A Composer.
It was at the new hotel which is evolving itself through the repair of
the never-finished and long-ruined Palace of Donn' Anna, wife of a
Spanish viceroy in the seventeenth century, that our guide stopped with
us for that cup of tea already mentioned.
We had to climb four nights of
stairs for it to the magnificent salon overlooking the finest
postal-card prospect in all Naples. We lingered long upon it, in the
balcony from which we could have dropped into the sunset sea any coin
which we could have brought ourselves to part with; but we had none of
the bad money which had been so easily passed off upon us. This sort
rather abounds in Naples, and the traveller should watch not only for
false francs, but for francs of an obsolete coinage which you can know
by the king's head having a longer neck than in the current pieces. At
the bookseller's they would not take a perfectly good five-franc piece
because it was so old as 1815; and what becomes of all the bad money one
innocently takes for good? One fraudulent franc I made a virtue of
throwing away; but I do not know what I did with a copper refused by a
trolley conductor as counterfeit. I could not take the affair seriously,
and perhaps I gave that copper in charity.
As we drove hotehvard through the pink twilight we met many carriages of
people who looked rich and noble, but whether they were so I do not
know. I only know that old ladies who regard the world severely from
their coaches behind the backs of their perfectly appointed coachmen and
footmen ought to be both, and that old gentlemen who frown over their
white mustaches have no right to their looks if they are neither. It
was, at any rate, the hour of the fashionable drive, which included a
pause midway of the Villa Nazionale for the music of the military band.
The band plays near the Aquarium, which I hope the reader will visit at
the earlier hours of the day. Then, if he has a passion for polyps, and
wishes to imagine how they could ingulf good-sized ships in the ages of
fable, he can see one of the hideous things float from its torpor in the
bottom of its tank, and seize Avith its hungry tentacles the food
lowered to it by a string. Still awfuller is it to see it rise and reach
with those prehensile members, as with the tails of a multi-caudate ape,
some rocky projection of its walls and lurk fearsomely into the hollow,
and vanish there in a loathly quiescence. The carnivorous spray and
bloom of the deep-sea flowers amid which drowned men's "bones are coral
made" seem of one temperament with the polyps as they slowly, slowly
wave their tendrils and petals; but there is amusement if not pleasure
in store for the traveller who turns from them to the company of shad
softly and continuously circling in their tank, and regarding the
spectators with a surly dignity becoming to people in better society
than others.
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