Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/427

Rh days, when we have been kept prisoners with bad weather and rain. I have availed myself of this time in writing letters which have long been weighing on my conscience with a sense of unfulfilled duty. The weather, generally clears for an hour in the afternoon, and immediately is the broad Chiaja crowded by a number of equipages of all kinds, amongst which the great equipages of the populace, the coricolo, loaded with from twenty to thirty people, men, women, and children, sitting, hanging on, and hanging to, one does not rightly see how, drawn by one horse, which gallops at full speed, always astonishes and amuses me. I have, however, already mentioned it. But amongst the great occupiers of the promenades, I have omitted to speak of those most constant, ever since the times of Virgil, namely, the goats, which during the whole afternoon come up in little flocks, with their herds from the side of Pozzuoli, where they have been grazing, to the city, to be milked, and spend the night. As soon as it is four o'clock in the afternoon, I hear their little bells ringing along the Chiaja, where, undisturbed by the driving and noisy great world, they move past the grave of the poet who has so sung of them in his pastorals.

Whilst I write, and watch animals and men, my summer-daughter is generally singing. Elsa is just now in a sort of musical intoxication. We live in the same good boarding-house as at my first arrival at Naples. I have again my old room, looking on the Chiaja, and my summer-daughter has one towards the garden with oleanders peeping in at the window. There was not room for Waldo in the house, which