rture for Italy.

After a favorable sea passage, they landed at Civita Vecchia, and,
with brief delays at Rome and Naples, went to Sorrento, intending to
remain there several months.

This place combines the most striking peculiarities of Italian
scenery. It stands on a wide and beautiful plain, shut in by the
mountains and the sea. The fertile soil produces oranges, lemons,
grapes, and figs of the richest quality and in great abundance. The
coast line, a wall of volcanic rock, is broken into varied forms, by
the constant action of the waters. Here, they spent day after day,
rambling about the old town, making excursions into the neighboring
mountains, or crossing the bay to different points of interest. They
delighted particularly in sailing under the shadow of the cliffs,
watching the varying colors, blue, purple, and green, presented by the
glassy surface, peering into the arched caverns, worn into the rock
by the waves, and looking upward at the gay profusion of wild flowers,
which, growing in every crevice, adorned its face with beauty. From
the balcony of the house they occupied, they looked upon gardens,
invisible from the street, so closely were they walled in from the
view of the passer by, and beheld orange and lemon trees, with rounded
tops of dark green foliage, golden fruit, and snowy blossoms. The soft
air permitted them to sit during the evenings and listen to the
whisper of the sea on the beach, to watch the sails of the fishing
vessels gleaming in the moonlight, and gaze at the dark form of
Vesuvius, with his lighted torch, brooding at a distance, over the
scene.

A month had thus passed away. A marked improvement had taken place in
Mrs. Lansdowne's health, and John proposed that they should go to
Naples and make an excursion thence to Pompeii.

One morning, they drove out from the swarming city toward those famous
ruins, revealing to the curious so much of the old Roman civilization.
After a drive of twelve miles past fields of lava and ashes, the
accumulations from recent irruptions of Vesuvius, they arrived at the
street of tombs, a fitting entrance to the desolated city. Here, the
beautifully sculptured monuments, memorials of a departed generation,
awoke in their hearts a peculiar interest. Through these they entered
at once into the inner life of joys and sorrows of an extinct race.

"How terrible death must have been to these people, whose ideas of the
future world were so vague and unsatis