these some half-dozen were
persevering mendicants. It disappointed me that I saw no interesting
costume; all wore the common, colourless garb of our destroying age.
The only vivid memory of these people which remains with me is the
cadence of their speech. Whilst I was breakfasting, two women stood at
gossip on a near balcony, and their utterance was a curious
exaggeration of the Neapolitan accent; every sentence rose to a high
note, and fell away in a long curve of sound, sometimes a musical wail,
more often a mere whining. The protraction of the last word or two was
really astonishing; again and again I fancied that the speaker had
broken into song. I cannot say that the effect was altogether pleasant;
in the end such talk would tell severely on civilized nerves, but it
harmonized with the coloured houses, the luxuriant vegetation, the
strange odours, the romantic landscape.

In front of the vehicle were three little horses; behind it was hitched
an old shabby two-wheeled thing, which we were to leave somewhere for
repairs. With whip-cracking and vociferation, amid good-natured
farewells from the crowd, we started away. It was just ten o'clock.

At once the road began to climb, and nearly three hours were spent in
reaching the highest point of the mountain barrier. Incessantly
winding, often doubling upon itself, the road crept up the sides of
profound gorges, and skirted many a precipice; bridges innumerable
spanned the dry ravines which at another season are filled with furious
torrents. From the zone of orange and olive and cactus we passed that
of beech and oak, noble trees now shedding their rich-hued foliage on
bracken crisped and brown; here I noticed the feathery bowers of wild
clematis ("old man's beard"), and many a spike of the great mullein,
strange to me because so familiar in English lanes. Through mists that
floated far below I looked over miles of shore, and outward to the
ever-rising limit of sea and sky. Very lovely were the effects of
light, the gradations of colour; from the blue-black abysses, where no
shape could be distinguished, to those violet hues upon the furrowed
heights which had a transparency, a softness, an indefiniteness, unlike
anything to be seen in northern landscape.

The driver was accompanied by a half-naked lad, who, at certain points,
suddenly disappeared, and came into view again after a few minutes,
having made a short cut up some rugged footway between the loops of the
ro