ain that forms the head of the bay, he will get an
outline of all that strikes the eye as the stranger approaches Naples
from the sea.

The zephyr was again blowing, and the daily fleet of sparanaras, or
undecked feluccas, that passes every morning at this season, from the
south shore to the capital, and returns at this hour, was stretching out
from under Vesuvius; some looking up as high as Massa; others heading
toward Sorrento or Vico or Persano, and many keeping more before the
wind, toward Castel-a-Mare, or the landings in that neighborhood. The
breeze was getting to be so fresh that the fishermen were beginning to
pull in toward the land, breaking up their lines, which in some places
had extended nearly a league, and this, too, with the boats lying within
speaking distance of each other. The head of the bay, indeed, was alive
with craft moving in different directions, while a large fleet of
English, Russians, Neapolitans, and Turks, composed of two-deckers,
frigates, and sloops, lay at their anchors in front of the town. On
board of one of the largest of the former was flying the flag of a
rear-admiral at the mizzen, the symbol of the commander's rank. A
corvette alone was under-way. She had left the anchorage an hour before,
and, with studding-sails on her starboard side, was stretching
diagonally across the glorious bay, apparently heading toward the
passage between Capri and the Point of Campanella, bound to Sicily. This
ship might easily have weathered the island; but her commander, an easy
sort of person, chose to make a fair wind of it from the start, and he
thought, by hugging the coast, he might possibly benefit by the
land-breeze during the night, trusting to the zephyr that was then
blowing to carry him across the Gulf of Salerno. A frigate, too, shot
out of the fleet, under her staysails, as soon as the westerly wind
made; but she had dropped an anchor under-foot, and seemed to wait some
preparation, or orders, before taking her departure; her captain being
at that moment on board the flag-ship, on duty with the rear-admiral.
This was the Proserpine thirty-six, Captain Cuffe, a vessel and an
officer that are already both acquaintances of the reader. About an hour
before the present scene opens, Captain Cuffe, in fact, had been called
on board the Foudroyant by signal, where he had found a small,
sallow-looking, slightly-built man, with his right arm wanting, pacing
the deck of the fore-cabin, impatient f