he outline of the bay appeared in glimpses, shyly revealed,
suddenly withdrawn from sight; the immobility and majesty of
mountains contrasted with the weltering waste of water round us--now
blue and garish where the sunlight fell, now shrouded in squally
rain-storms, and then again sullen beneath a vaporous canopy. Each
of these vignettes was photographed for one brief second on the
brain, and swallowed by the hurling drift of billows. The painter's
art could but ill have rendered that changeful colour in the sea,
passing from tawny cloud-reflections and surfaces of glowing violet
to bright blue or impenetrable purple flecked with boiling foam,
according as a light-illuminated or a shadowed facet of the moving
mass was turned to sight.

Halfway across the gulf the sirocco lulled; the sail was lowered,
and we had to make the rest of the passage by rowing. Under the lee
of Ischia we got into comparatively quiet water; though here the
beautiful Italian sea was yellowish green with churned-up sand, like
an unripe orange. We passed the castle on its rocky island, with the
domed church which has been so often painted in _gouache_ pictures
through the last two centuries, and soon after noon we came to
Casamicciola.

La Piccola Sentinella

Casamicciola is a village on the north side of the island, in its
centre, where the visitors to the mineral baths of Ischia chiefly
congregate. One of its old-established inns is called La Piccola
Sentinella. The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with a
pink wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays of
thick-clustering scarlet and magenta flowers. This is a rambling
house, built in successive stages against a hill, with terraces and
verandahs opening on unexpected gardens to the back and front.
Beneath its long irregular facade there spreads a wilderness of
orange-trees and honeysuckles and roses, verbenas, geraniums and
mignonette, snapdragons, gazanias and stocks, exceeding bright and
fragrant, with the green slopes of Monte Epomeo for a background and
Vesuvius for far distance. There are wonderful bits of detail in
this garden. One dark, thick-foliaged olive, I remember, leaning
from the tufa over a lizard-haunted wall, feathered waist-high in
huge acanthus leaves. The whole rich orchard ground of Casamicciola
is dominated by Monte Epomeo, the extinct volcano which may be
called the _raison d'etre_ of Ischia; for this island is nothing but
a mountain lifted by the e