From half-past four to half-past six I walked alone through the _old_ Naples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the very poor, vocal with them too (their voices carry so that every child seems to be calling to the whole street, goats, donkeys, chickens, and an occasional cow mixed in), and no light of heaven getting indoors. The street floor composed of cave-like shops, the people doing their work on chairs in the street for the sake of light, and in the black inside, beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be hard to match. I have come here too late in life, when the picturesque has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me like a passion, and such sights would have then been the solidest of mental food. I put up then with such inferior substitutional suggestions as Geneva and Paris afforded--but these black old Naples streets are not suggestions, they are the reality itself--full orchestra. I have got such an impression of the essential sociability of this race, especially in the country. A smile will go so far with them--even without the accompanying copper. And the children are so sweet. Tell Aleck to drop his other studies, learn _Italian_ (real Italian, not the awful gibberish I try to speak), cultivate his beautiful smile, learn a sentimental song or two, bring a tambourine or banjo, and come down here and fraternize with the common people along the coast--he can go far, and make friends, and be a social success, even if he should go back to a clean hotel of some sort for sleep every night.... _To his Daughter._ On board S.S. Orénogne, approaching PIRÆUS, GREECE, _Apr. 3, 1905_.