streets, now widening out again on the
hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the
Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the
sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without
which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in
the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries
of terror and delight.

Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a
strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that
coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the
fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless
drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but
biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and
often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands,
the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters
of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too
by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to
the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to
tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings
will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which
he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in
life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining
coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and
where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor
who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with
the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to
accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one
resource is the coral-fishery.

The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young
fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former
years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal
begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents
of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the
favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with
cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it,
the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted
room where her friends await