After dinner we crossed the garden again, and again stood by the
sea-wall. Over us the soft spring night was like a dark sapphire. Points
of red, green, and yellow fire burned from the ships in the bay, and
seemed of the same company as the stars above them. A rosy aureole in
the sky, to the eastward, marked the smouldering crater of Vesuvius.
Away in the Chiaja a man was singing comic songs, to an accompaniment
of mandolines and guitars; comic songs that sounded pathetic, as they
reached us in the distance.