f their pale salmon and grey shot colours and
greyish-green leaves, or fringes, each flower distinct against field
or sky, on the ledges of rock and the high earth banks. The flowers
are rarely perfect when you pick them, some of the starry blossoms
having withered and left an untidy fringe instead; but at a distance
this half-decay gives them a singular distinction, makes the light
fall on the very tips, the silvery buds, sinking the stretching out
branches and picking out the pale rose colour with grey. The beauty of
the plant is in the candlestick thrust of the branches. The flower has
a faint oniony smell, but fresh like box hedge.

ANZIO, EASTER DAY.

XVI.

NETTUNO.

Nettuno, a little castellated town on the rocks; battlemented walls
and towers, a house with fortified windows, a sixteenth-century
fortress, very beautiful. All manner of vines, weeds and lilac flowers
growing in the walls. Men in boots and breeches and brigand hats
about, women with outside stays. In the evening a flock of goats being
milked. Strings of mules, literally strings, beasts tied together.

Last evening we bicycled beyond Nettuno on the way to Torre Astura,
which you see bounding this semicircular gulf, vague great mountains
behind. The Cape of Circe, which looks (and surely must have been) an
island, came out faint towards evening, a great cliff ending in
something like a castle, apparently in the middle of the sea,
mysterious. We got, skirting the sea, to a large heath--a heath, black
sandy soil, of budding bracken, grass and asphodels; immense,
inexpressibly solemn and fresh; a little wood of cork-trees in the
distance, a broken Roman ruin, blue Apennines half hidden in clouds. A
few shepherds were going home, looking immense on the flatness, and
goats and horses. Song of larks, and suddenly an unexpected booming of
surf. Following the sound inexplicably loud, across the deeper black
sandy soil, we got to the sea. Most strange against it, a fringe of
marshy grass, of bulrushes! Far off the tower of Astura, and the faint
Cape of Circe among mists. It began to rain.

ANZIO, _Easter_.

XVII.

TORRE ASTURA.

Yesterday evening bicycled farther in the direction of Torre Astura,
which seemed quite near in its solitude. The dunes were covered with
thick bushes of lentisk, myrtle and similar shrubs; every step bruised
some scented thing. Along the sands, black, hard and full of coloured
shells, was a strip of bulrush