e. Succarina is a
favorite, the kindest, easiest, and surest-footed of beasts,--a
diminutive animal, not bigger than a Friesland sheep; old, in fact
grizzly with years, and not unlike the aged, wizened little women who
are so common here: for beauty in this region dries up; and these
handsome Sorrento girls, if they live, and almost everybody does
live, have the prospect, in their old age, of becoming mummies, with
parchment skins. I have heard of climates that preserve female
beauty; this embalms it, only the beauty escapes in the process. As
I was saying, Succarina is little, old, and grizzly; but her head is
large, and one might be contented to be as wise as she looks.

The party is at length mounted, and clatters away through the narrow
streets. Donkey-riding is very good for people who think they cannot
walk. It looks very much like riding, to a spectator; and it
deceives the person undertaking it into an amount of exercise equal
to walking. I have a great admiration for the donkey character.
There never was such patience under wrong treatment, such return of
devotion for injury. Their obstinacy, which is so much talked about,
is only an exercise of the right of private judgment, and an
intelligent exercise of it, no doubt, if we could take the donkey
point of view, as so many of us are accused of doing in other things.
I am certain of one thing: in any large excursion party there will be
more obstinate people than obstinate donkeys; and yet the poor brutes
get all the thwacks and thumps. We are bound to-day for the Punta
della Campanella, the extreme point of the promontory, and ten miles
away. The path lies up the steps from the new Massa carriage-road,
now on the backbone of the ridge, and now in the recesses of the
broken country. What an animated picture is the donkeycade, as it
mounts the steeps, winding along the zigzags! Hear the little
bridlebells jingling, the drivers groaning their "a-e-ugh, a-e-ugh,"
the riders making a merry din of laughter, and firing off a fusillade
of ejaculations of delight and wonder.

The road is between high walls; round the sweep of curved terraces
which rise above and below us, bearing the glistening olive; through
glens and gullies; over and under arches, vine-grown,--how little we
make use of the arch at home!--round sunny dells where orange
orchards gleam; past shrines, little chapels perched on rocks, rude
villas commanding most extensive sweeps of sea and shore. The alm