DEAR BROTHER D. R.: We have climbed Vesuvius. One feels richly paid when the puffing and exploding and ascending of the red-hot lava meet the ears and eyes. The mountains, the Bay of Naples, the sail to Capri and the Blue Grotto are fully equal to my expectations.... The squalid-looking people, however, and their hopeless fate make one's stay at any of these Italian resorts most depressing. Troops of beggars beset one all along the streets and roads, and with tradesmen there is no honesty. For instance, a man charged some twenty francs for a shell comb, then came down to seven, six, five, and finally asked, "What will you give?" I, never dreaming he would take it, said, "two francs," and he threw the comb into the carriage.... Saturday we took the cars from Naples to Palermo. Every mountainside having a few seven-by-nine patches of soil in a place, is terraced and covered with grape vines and lemon trees, the latter now yellow with fruit. On many I counted twenty and thirty terraces, each with a solid stone wall to hold the earth in place. It is wonderful what an amount of labor it costs to earn even the little the natives seem to care for. Our hotel here is an old monastery, and on one side of the court is the cathedral with its grotesque paintings. One becomes fairly sickened with the ghastly spectacle of the dead Christ. It is amazing how little they make of the living Christ. On Monday morning we drove back over that magnificent road, and took the train to Naples. In the afternoon we went to Lake Avernus and into the grotto of the sibyls, the entrance to Dante's Inferno. It was a dark, cavernous passage and with the flaring candles making the darkness only more visible, we could not but feel there was reason for the old superstition. The narrowness of the streets of Naples--and they are without the pretense of a sidewalk--leave the men, women and children, horses and carriages, funny little donkeys with their big loads, the cows and goats (which are each night and morning driven along and halted at the doors while the pint cupful, more or less, is milked to supply the people within) all marching along together in the filthy road, jostling each other at every step. But we are back in Rome now and this forenoon we spent in the galleries of the Vatican. One is simply dazed with the wealth of marble--not only statuary, but stairs, pillars and massive buildings. We stop here till the 9th, then go to Florence.[15]