already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their
places _vis-a-vis_, while the landlord seized his tambourine and
beat from it a wild and lively measure. The women were barefooted
and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of
natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid
grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of
dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the music; then, filled
with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled
away;--snapping their fingers above their heads, and looking over
their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other,
they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing,
and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon the brain like
the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine
and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven
knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the
pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must
confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements,
and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She
earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the
dance was over, and went contentedly back to her mule.

The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with
which he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the
Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock
immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used
to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them.
These have taken their place in the insular imagination as Christian
martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls were any thing but
Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown from the brink of the rock twenty
seconds to send back a response from the water below, and the depth
was too dizzying to look into. So we looked instead toward Amalfi,
across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples, across her bay. On
every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable calm
dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened and softened
in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of ghostly
solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius is
well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have
sought this spot to enjoy the eveni