donkey, tricked out gaily enough in tags of color and
tinkling bells. It was very quaint and delightful to get into the funny,
low, rattling cart, and go jogging off, while the feminine sight-seers
fanned themselves in the windows of the ladies' waiting-room, and
grumbled, and the poor masculine travellers bartered in poor Italian,
with their certain-to-conquer enemies, those triumphant swindlers, the
drivers of the conveyances between Sorrento and Castellamare.

Then they began that wonderful ride along the coast. The horrors of
the day before rolled away like a mist as the donkey jogged along that
miraculous drive. Lisetta and Gaetano chattered together, and Mae sat
very still, with her face to the sea, drinking in all the glory, as she
had longed and planned. Hope revived in her breast, pride had stood by
her all the while, and here was glorious nature coming to her aid. She
was going swiftly to the orange groves and the children of the sun. She
should see Talila and brown babies and dancing, and at night a great,
yellow moon would light up the whole scene. So on and on they went,
the travelling carriages dashing by them now and then, with their three
donkeys abreast, and the driver cracking his whip, and the travellers
oh-ing and ah-ing.

"That is the most picturesque peasant I have yet seen," said a gentle
lady in brown to her husband, as they passed the humble little party.
"Yes, she is clean, and more like the ideal than the actual peasant, and
I am very glad I have seen her."

Really, Mae was for the moment, at a quick glance, the ideal peasant.
Her hands lay in her lap, her face was toward the sea, and her attitude
and features were all full of that glow of existence that peasant
portraits possess. She lived and moved and had her being as part of
a great, warm, live picture. If the lady in brown had not passed so
quickly, however, she would have seen a something in Mae's face that
spoiled her for a peasant, an earnestness in her admiration, a sharp
intensity in her joy, that was very different from the languid content
of a Southern Italian. Her movements were rather like those of the
Northern squirrel, which climbs nimbly and frisks briskly, than like the
sinuous, serpentine motions of the Southern creatures of the soil. We
are, after all, born where we belong, as a rule, and the rest of us soon
belong where we are born.

After a time the donkey pattered along towards a little patch of
houses on the shore.