e
cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will
pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so
instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little
parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily
brief. He sees no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist;
he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to
Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and
has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to
Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the
procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to
the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers.

What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to
see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra
employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the
African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the
island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the
great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn;
and the Sunday before they start--generally one of the last Sundays in
January--serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak
the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and
high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness
streams out of church into the sunshine. At its head come the
"Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but
all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles
of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by
rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and
then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments
of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but
the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure
to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the
Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four
elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic,
wonderful"--somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic
land--comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown
of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is
the Madonna of Carmel who