through her fingers in glittering drops, as if a handful of coins was
melting in her palm. Whatever is held in the water assumes, for the
time, this silver-color, and the blades of the oars shone as though the
Capri boatmen were so rich that they had made them of pure silver.

For hundreds of years the Grotto was known to exist somewhere under the
cliffs of the island, but so small is the entrance that it was not
rediscovered until this century. It can not be entered except the sea
around the island is very calm; and as all the beautiful effects are due
to the refraction of light, the bright mid-day sun should be shining
without.

THE ALBATROSS.

[Illustration: A SKIMMER OF THE SOUTHERN SEAS.]

Far away in the desolate South Seas there lives a large and beautiful
bird called the albatross, the giant member of the petrel family. The
wandering albatross (_Diomedea exulans_) is the largest of its tribe.
Specimens have been captured measuring four feet in length, and with an
expanse of wing from ten to fourteen feet. The body of this bird is very
large, its neck is short and stout, and its head is armed with a
powerful hooked beak from six to eight inches long. It is snowy,
glistening white, its long wing-feathers tipped with black.

Its mighty strength of wing renders it the admiration of all navigators,
who fitly name it the lord of the stormy seas. In the desolate regions
where it lives the sailors hail its appearance with delight, as it comes
sailing around the ship with majestic, careless flight, rising, sinking,
now swooping down to seize some cast-off mouthful of food, now poising
high above the mast-head, moving with the ship at the most rapid speed,
and yet with scarcely a perceptible movement of its gigantic wings.

In storm or calm the albatross is master of the wind and waves. Sailors,
straining every nerve to guide the laboring, struggling ship through
tempestuous seas, look up, and see far above their heads the albatross
calmly breasting the gale, its majesty unruffled, and its great
out-stretched wings as motionless as on a still, sunny day. Its strength
of flight is marvellous, and is said to be superior to that of any other
bird. Sailors have captured these royal inhabitants of southern polar
regions, and marked their glistening breasts with spots of tar, that
they might distinguish them and determine their power of endurance; and
in several instances the same bird has followed a ship under f