Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the
name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the
sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem
marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every
raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the
fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of
the present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction.
But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to
give a special archaeological interest to the little rock-refuge of
Capri.

THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.

III.

The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly
into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief
and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The
stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in
November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a
fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an
English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the
summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the
Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has
almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom
cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping
down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the
difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little
piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a
delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under
the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the
brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit,
women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the
birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay
is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in
English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman
prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne
with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows
he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he
smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and
the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till th