p,
where, like a bird on a tree he looks all ways, and, so to say, swings
in the entrancing air. But, wherever you are, you will grow into content
with your situation.

At the Villa Nardi we have no sound of wheels, no noise of work or
traffic, no suggestion of conflict. I am under the impression that
everything that was to have been done has been done. I am, it is true, a
little afraid that the Saracens will come here again, and carry off more
of the nut-brown girls, who lean over the walls, and look down on us
from under the boughs. I am not quite sure that a French Admiral of the
Republic will not some morning anchor his three-decker in front, and
open fire on us; but nothing else can happen. Naples is a thousand miles
away. The boom of the saluting guns of Castel Nuovo is to us scarcely
an echo of modern life. Rome does not exist. And as for London and New
York, they send their people and their newspapers here, but no pulse of
unrest from them disturbs our tranquillity. Hemmed in on the land side
by high walls, groves, and gardens, perched upon a rock two hundred feet
above the water, how much more secure from invasion is this than any
fabled island of the southern sea, or any remote stream where the boats
of the lotus-eaters float!

There is a little terrace and flower-plat, where we sometimes sit, and
over the wall of which we like to lean, and look down the cliff to the
sea. This terrace is the common ground of many exotics as well as
native trees and shrubs. Here are the magnolia, the laurel, the Japanese
medlar, the oleander, the pepper, the bay, the date-palm, a tree called
the plumbago, another from the Cape of Good Hope, the pomegranate,
the elder in full leaf, the olive, salvia, heliotrope; close by is a
banana-tree.

I find a good deal of companionship in the rows of plaster busts that
stand on the wall, in all attitudes of listlessness, and all stages of
decay. I thought at first they were penates of the premises; but better
acquaintance has convinced me that they never were gods, but the clayey
representations of great men and noble dames. The stains of time are on
them; some have lost a nose or an ear; and one has parted with a still
more important member--his head,--an accident that might profitably have
befallen his neighbor, whose curly locks and villainously low forehead
proclaim him a Roman emperor. Cut in the face of the rock is a walled
and winding way down to the water. I see below the archwa