o make pleasure to the parents and
to make riunione outside and to baptize the ship, but inside it is
riunione not at all. It is to kiss with the lips and the heart is hating
each others. This is not a good thing."

The boat with the name that pleased me best was not there. Peppino told
me about it: it belonged to him before the money came from America and he
used it to ferry tourists across the bay and into the bowels of the
promontory through the mouth of a grotto where the reflected lights are
lovely on a sunny day; he called it the _Anime del Purgatorio_.

This would have been just the morning to visit the caves, for there were
no clouds. We stood on the deck of the _Sorella di Ninu_, looking up
through the brown masts and the rigging into the blue sky, and watching
the gulls as they glided and circled above us and turned their white
wings to the sun. Vanni did the honours of his ship, showed us his
barrels and casks, nearly all empty now, and made us look down into the
hold where there was a cask capable of holding, I forget how much, but it
was so big that it could never have been got into the ship after it was
made, so it had to be built inside. Then we must taste his wine, of
which he still had some in one of the casks, and the captain brought
tumblers and another queer-shaped glass with a string round its rim in
which to fetch the wine up; it was about the size and shape of a
fir-cone, the broad upper part being hollow to hold the wine, and the
pointed lower part solid. The captain held it by the string and dropped
it neatly down through the bung-hole, as one drops a bucket into a well;
its heavy point sank through the wine without any of that swishing and
swashing which happens with a flat-bottomed, buoyant, wooden bucket, and
he drew it up full and gleaming like a jewel. The first lot was used to
rinse the tumblers inside and out and then thrown overboard, sparkling
and flashing in the sunlight as it fell into the sea. The taster was
lowered again and the tumblers filled.

Vanni, seeing I admired the taster, wanted to give it to me, but it was
the only one he had and was in constant use when customers came to the
ship, so I declined it and he promised to bring one for me next time his
ship made a voyage; in the meantime I took one of the tumblers as a
ricordo. Then we went into the captain's cabin and sat round his table
listening to his stories and smoking cigarettes. Every now and then a
silenc