throwing out a quantity of
sardines, which flapped and fluttered in the sunshine like scales of
silver. The wind blowing freshly bore thousands of little purple waves
to break one after another at the foamy line which lay on the sand.

Agnes ran gayly along the beach with her flowers and vines fluttering
from her gay striped apron, and her cheeks flushed with exercise
and pleasure,--sometimes stopping and turning with animation to her
grandmother to point out the various floral treasures that enamelled
every crevice and rift of the steep wall of rock which rose
perpendicularly above their heads in that whole line of the shore which
is crowned with the old city of Sorrento: and surely never did rocky
wall show to the open sea a face more picturesque and flowery. The deep
red cliff was hollowed here and there into fanciful grottos, draped with
every varied hue and form of vegetable beauty. Here a crevice high in
air was all abloom with purple gillyflower, and depending in festoons
above it the golden blossoms of the broom; here a cleft seemed to be a
nestling-place for a colony of gladiolus, with its crimson flowers
and blade-like leaves; here the silver-frosted foliage of the
miller-geranium, or of the wormwood, toned down the extravagant
brightness of other blooms by its cooler tints. In some places it seemed
as if a sort of floral cascade were tumbling confusedly over the rocks,
mingling all hues and all forms in a tangled mass of beauty.

"Well, well," said old Elsie, as Agnes pointed to some superb
gillyflowers which grew nearly half-way up the precipice,--"is the
child possessed? You have all the gorge in your apron already. Stop
looking, and let us hurry on."

After a half-hour's walk, they came to a winding staircase cut in the
rock, which led them a zigzag course up through galleries and grottos
looking out through curious windows and loop-holes upon the sea, till
finally they emerged at the old sculptured portal of a shady garden
which was surrounded by the cloistered arcades of the Convent of Saint
Agnes.

The Convent of Saint Agnes was one of those monuments in which the piety
of the Middle Ages delighted to commemorate the triumphs of the new
Christianity over the old Heathenism.

The balmy climate and paradisiacal charms of Sorrento and the adjacent
shores of Naples had made them favorite resorts during the latter period
of the Roman Empire,--a period when the whole civilized world seemed
to human vie