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Hotel Patria Napoli Maggio I. Dear Dad Well here I am back in Naples for a few days. We spent six days at Capri four of which it rained most of the time. We came here two days ago. The first day we walked around and say the place generally and yesterday we went to Pompeii and Vesuvius. They are most marvelous places Pompeii and Vesuvius each in it's own different way. We were very fortunate in going under the auspices of Cook's tourist agency. There is a special rate for men in uniform and is does away with all bother of tipping and supplies a first class guide who is paid by the Cook Compay. There were four of us, the boy who is with me named Holmes, our treasurer whom we met here, and an American who supplied fun for the whole of us. We went by an electric train from Naples and skirted along between Vesuvius and the sea until we reached that "City of the Dead". The paving blocks are there on the streets with the ruts of the chariots just as they were two thousand years ago. This first thing our American friend said when he saw how modern they looked was to suppose that they had been put there for the convenience of tourists and when told their age exclaimed in true American fashion "Well what do you know about that". We walked up the main street and saw the old shops with marble counters where they sold their wares. Wineshops with huge earthen jars sunk in the counters and bakeries with the ruins of the ancient ovens, also flour mill with huge stones for crushing the grain still in the same positions as they were abandoned so long ago. One of the first things we saw were the skeletons of six people who evidently had tried to escape the pending doom and had succeeded only in reaching the hall where they had been suffocated.