n fashion as they pass
by. It is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its
stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few
places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of
"studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its
beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist
reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit
of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion
of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the
archaeologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house
of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer,
the ruins of mediaeval castles crown the heights of Castiglione and
Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome
supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen
of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most
remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form
the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface
serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way
which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and
Jerusalem.

For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of
amusements of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly
than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals,"
cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like
giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which
stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and
"rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps
of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can
lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is,
has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which
meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church
the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange
kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange
processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep
into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces
sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads
which might have been dug up at Pompeii; pri