ted, to the hotel, where we found
Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day
to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad
weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying
in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have
spent a fortnight there.

We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his
household to present the account,--each one full of visible longing,
yet restrained from asking _buonamano_ by a strong sense of previous
contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered
themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took
leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies
crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in
silence. As we drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on
a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea.
Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso,--in which the novelist
Cooper also resided when in Sorrento,--a white house not handsomer nor
uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water. The
bluffs are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said,
giving shelter to the fishermen's boats, and here and there a devious
stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, noting how
in the house above us the people, with that puerility usually
mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of
terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was
nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli;
and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst
of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every
direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the
currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze
at this moment.

Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept
us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end
for a prodigious _buonamano_; yet I cannot escape the conviction that
he parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and
I have a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell
next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that
his name, Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom
of the Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that