lead through
galleries and corridors, and high, vaulted passages, whence extend
apartments and caves far reaching into the solid rock. At intervals are
landings, where arched windows are cut out to the sea, with stone seats
and protecting walls. At the base of the cliff I find a hewn passage, as
if there had once been here a way of embarkation; and enormous fragments
of rocks, with steps cut in them, which have fallen from above.

Were these anything more than royal pleasure galleries, where one
could sit in coolness in the heat of summer and look on the bay and its
shipping, in the days when the great Roman fleet used to lie opposite,
above the point of Misenum? How many brave and gay retinues have swept
down these broad interior stairways, let us say in the picturesque
Middle Ages, to embark on voyages of pleasure or warlike forays! The
steps are well worn, and must have been trodden for ages, by nobles and
robbers, peasants and sailors, priests of more than one religion, and
traders of many seas, who have gone, and left no record. The sun was
slanting his last rays into the corridors as I musingly looked down from
one of the arched openings, quite spellbound by the strangeness and dead
silence of the place, broken only by the plash of waves on the sandy
beach below. I had found my way down through a wooden door half ajar;
and I thought of the possibility of some one's shutting it for the
night, and leaving me a prisoner to await the spectres which I have no
doubt throng here when it grows dark. Hastening up out of these chambers
of the past, I escaped into the upper air, and walked rapidly home
through the narrow orange lanes.

ON TOP OF THE HOUSE

The tiptop of the Villa Nardi is a flat roof, with a wall about it three
feet high, and some little turreted affairs, that look very much like
chimneys. Joseph, the gray-haired servitor, has brought my chair and
table up here to-day, and here I am, established to write.

I am here above most earthly annoyances, and on a level with the
heavenly influences. It has always seemed to me that the higher one
gets, the easier it must be to write; and that, especially at a great
elevation, one could strike into lofty themes, and launch out, without
fear of shipwreck on any of the earthly headlands, in his aerial
voyages. Yet, after all, he would be likely to arrive nowhere, I
suspect; or, to change the figure, to find that, in parting with the
taste of the earth, he had p