"Dear Emma, in the midst of all this turmoil and labour--for it is the labour of Hercules to do so much and not appear to be doing--she contrives to be just as affectionate and thoughtful as when we landed three months ago and there was not a cloud upon the horizon. Whenever I am disengaged, she contrives to be with me: she has so great a fear of being inhospitable to one who on any reasoning must soon sail. I do not find myself so afraid of her now.... No! I was never afraid of Emma--I was afraid of myself. Needlessly, I think. I should have known that such a steady flame of friendship will not set fire or consume. She has been like a mother to Josiah, and she has been like a mother to me, though so much younger. She says that all sailors are children--God's children: not meaning by this that they are godly, though the roughest sailor is by nature of his calling apt to keep some notion of a Deity in his heart; but because God keeps them in some respects in a state of childhood, being so much cut off from the world in which others are offered the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She says to me, 'You are a great conqueror, and yet you are a child, and I must take care of you.' She says that she was wrote to when I first came to Naples, to take care of me from the ladies, which indeed she has done; so that, though there are some very beautiful young women among the English residents as well as at the Court, I am not in the train of any of them, but have been a stay-at-home when there were not public ceremonies. I am not afraid of myself now,--I know the quality of her affection. And if sometimes she is carried away by enthusiasm, I know that it is but the homage of a generous heart to a wounded man--who has won a victory. And I take it in the spirit in which it is offered." CHAPTER XVIII.--How the Neapolitans declared War, and how they waged it.