And My Lady, ever quick to feel the pulse of his desires, and having the Queen accustomed to follow her impulses, with a laugh, in one minute directed a forward movement. The Admiral was much amazed at the smallness, nay, meanness of the houses; and made inquiry if only the dwellings of the shop-keepers and other baser sort of persons had been in the town, the rich resorting to villas in the outskirts. "By no means," said the Director: "this is a Roman senator's house you have before you, and that which you have but now examined belonged to one of the most famous proconsuls--a class which of all others had the best opportunity of enriching themselves." The Admiral was profoundly impressed. "What a people!" he said. "A man who had ruled half Asia came to end his days in a house which had no windows and no door, but such as we give our servants at the kitchen-back; which covered no more ground than a cottage, and had, like a cottage, only the one floor, and had in the whole of it but one room large enough for company. How the great Romans, for whom the world was too little, could bear to be cooped up in those little cells, no larger than a cabin, in a climate like this passes my comprehension." All present agreed with him--as like as not their code of manners demanded that they should appear to--all, except the Prince Caracciolo, who was of the Neapolitan Navy, and of the party. He was a man cut on the cross-grain, and said, with a licence very unusual among Italians, except when they are looking for a quarrel: "If I could persuade myself that these pig-styes were actually the work of Roman architecture I should feel no difficulty in solving the doubts of my credulous English friend. It was these very confined cells which made them so eager to get abroad, and enlarge by conquest their elbow-room. And the same reason induces us modern Italians who live in comfortable, lofty, and spacious dwellings to remain where we are, convinced, as we feel, that any change of abode would only be for the worse." The Prince, it must be known, had a good estate in Naples, at the corner of the Chiaja, where the road goes off to Pausilippo, and bounding on that side the fine new gardens of the Thuilleries, which the King had made with pleached walks and a fair open space in the midst, to display that wonder of antiquity, the Farnese Bull, which came to him by inheritance a little since. Mr. Comyn did not render his speech, knowing the Admiral's temper, and the avoidance of quarrels commending itself to him as a clerk in holy orders. It was a happy chance that he, not Will, was interpreting for the Admiral at the moment. Not that Will would have rendered his impertinence to the Admiral, but that he would have felt it incumbent upon himself to force the stout, ill-conditioned Prince to swallow an insult direct, or fight.