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.) "There are worse things in the States than the mutton," replied Mr. Mafferton, moving his chair to enable him, by twisting his neck not too ostentatiously, to glance occasionally at Dicky and Isabel, "but the steaks were distinctly better than the chops--distinctly." "So all connoisseurs say," I replied respectfully. "Would you like to change seats with me? I don't mind sitting with my back to--Vesuvius." Mr. Mafferton blushed--unless it was the glow from the volcano. "Not on my account," he said. "By any means." "You do not fear a demonstration," I suggested. "And yet the forces of nature are very uncertain. That is your English nerve. It deserves all that is said of it." Mr. Mafferton looked at me suspiciously. "I fancy you must be joking," he said. He sometimes complained that the great bar to his observation of the American character was the American sense of humour. It was one of the things he had made a note of, as interfering with the intelligent stranger's enjoyment of the country. "I suppose," I replied reproachfully, "you never pause to think how unkind a suspicion like that is? When one _wishes_ to be taken seriously." "I fear I do not," Mr. Mafferton confessed. "Perhaps I jump rather hastily to conclusions sometimes. It's a family trait. We get it through the Warwick-Howards on my mother's side." "Then, of course, there can't be any objection to it. But when one knows a person's opinion of frivolity, always to be thought frivolous by the person is hard to bear. Awfully."