rk, 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 energy of fire from the sea-basement. Its
fantastic peaks and ridges, sulphur-coloured, dusty grey, and tawny,
with brushwood in young leaf upon the cloven flanks, form a singular
pendant to the austere but more artistically modelled limestone
crags of Capri. No two islands that I know, within so short a space
of sea, offer two pictures so different in style and quality of
loveliness. The inhabitants are equally distinct in type. Here, in
spite of what De Musset wrote somewhat affectedly about the peasant
girls--

Ischia! c'est la qu'on a des yeux,
C'est la qu'un corsage amoureux
Serre la hanche.
Sur un bas rouge bien tire
Brille, sous le jupon dore,
La mule blanche--

in spite of these lines I did not find the Ischian women eminent, as
those of Capri are, for beauty. But the young men have fine, loose,
faun-like figures, and faces that would be strikingly handsome but
for too long and prominent noses. They are a singular race, graceful
in movement.

Evening is divine in Ischia. From the topmost garden terrace of the
inn one looks across the sea towards Terracina, Gaeta, and those
descending mountain buttresses, the Phlegraean plains, and the
distant snows of the Abruzzi. Rain-washed and luminous, the sunset
sky held Hesper trembling in a solid green of beryl. Fireflies
flashed among the orange blossoms. Far away in the obscurity of
eastern twilight glared the smouldering cone of Vesuvius--a crimson
blot upon the darkness--a Cyclops' eye, bloodshot and menacing.

The company in the Piccola Sentinella, young and old, were decrepit,
with an odd, rheumatic, shrivelled look upon them. The dining-room
reminded me, as certain rooms are apt to do, of a ship's saloon. I
felt as though I had got into the cabin of the _Flying Dutchman_,
and that all these people had been sitting there at meat a hundred
years, through storm and shine, for ever driving onward over immense
waves in an enchanted calm.

Ischia and Forio

One morning we drove along the shore, up hill, and down, by the
Porto d'Ischia to the town and castle. This country curiously
co