[Sidenote: _From Posilipo_ Nov. 12] Heaped beneath us all Naples, white and motionless in the silent blaze of the midday sun; circling the bay, still and smooth and blue as the sky above, a misty line of white villages; dark, velvety shadows draping the hills; on the horizon, rising abruptly, Capri’s notched silhouette—_tout semble suer la beauté—la bonne et franche beauté criarde des pays chauds européens_. * * * * * [Sidenote: _In the Strada del Porto_ Nov. 12] A strip of treacherous pavement slimy with garbage; the wan flicker of foul lanterns, vaguely revealing the black shapes of sail-like awnings above a network of mysterious masts; and the sodden, continuous uproar of a reeking crowd—hawkers of fruit, of fish, of assorted cigar-ends—fiercely clamouring together in the darkness.... By-and-bye, through the obscurity, peers the glossy vermilion of piled capsicums, the scarlet sparkle of bleeding pomegranates, and the hard flashing of scattered, silvery sardines. Here and there, behind a chestnut-brazier that shoots long, licking tongues of ruddy flame, the vacant, battered countenance of some aged crone; or amid a frenzied cracking of whips the clattering passage of a team of trembling mules, straining at a lean-shafted, high-wheeled cart, passing across the street, to disappear, engulfed in cavernous blackness, beneath a noisome archway. Bands of sailors jostle their way down the alley, rudely rebuffing the obscene advances of slatternly women; the night grows airless and stifling, under the dingy stars that speckle the black strip of sky overhead; and the street comes to possess a satanic fascination, almost epic in its intensity.... [Sidenote: _Moonlight_ Nov. 29] The long line of lamps casts countless, trembling pillars of dusky gold into the sea: the night is full of stifled light—a pale, quivering suffusion of mysterious blue. The Castello d’Oro floats, black as ink, like a shapeless hulk; across the empty sky a solitary, ghostly cloud lies sleeping; somewhere, beyond the bay, the moonlight is dancing; and the rhythm of the sleek, rolling waves drowsily, lazily, rises and falls. A boy and a girl lean together, watching the waves: some mandolines start a faint twanging; the distant rattle of a cab—then all is quiet; and the glow above Vesuvius, sullenly pulsing, alone breaks in upon the delicate serenity of the night.... [Sidenote: _At the Theatre Manzoni_ Nov. 26] I have been to many first-nights there, for I have found a certain childish charm in the small, shabby, blue-and-white theatre, the tiers of minute boxes, close-packed with faces, the noisy Neapolitan pit, and the inevitable row of callow critics, sucking their pencil-stumps, each with his hat tight-jammed behind his head.