lk about Capri, and to talk of going there. The Sorrento
people have no end of gossip about the wild island; and, simple and
primitive as they are, Capri is still more out of the world. I do not
know what enchantment there is on the island; but--whoever sets foot
there, they say, goes insane or dies a drunkard. I fancy the reason of
this is found in the fact that the Capri girls are raving beauties. I
am not sure but the monotony of being anchored off there in the bay,
the monotony of rocks and precipices that goats alone can climb, the
monotony of a temperature that scarcely ever, winter and summer, is
below 55 or above 75 Fahrenheit indoors, might drive one into lunacy.
But I incline to think it is due to the handsome Capri girls.

There are beautiful girls in Sorrento, with a beauty more than skin
deep, a glowing, hidden fire, a ripeness like that of the grape and the
peach which grows in the soft air and the sun. And they wither, like
grapes that hang upon the stem. I have never seen a handsome, scarcely
a decent-looking, old woman here. They are lank and dry, and their
bones are covered with parchment. One of these brown-cheeked girls, with
large, longing eyes, gives the stranger a start, now and then, when he
meets her in a narrow way with a basket of oranges on her head. I hope
he has the grace to go right by. Let him meditate what this vision of
beauty will be like in twenty ears.

The Capri girls are famed as magnificent beauties, but they fade like
their mainland sisters. The Saracens used to descend on their island,
and carry them off to their harems. The English, a very adventurous
people, who have no harems, have followed the Saracens. The young lords
and gentlemen have a great fondness for Capri. I hear gossip
enough about elopements, and not seldom marriages, with the island
girls,--bright girls, with the Greek mother-wit, and surpassingly
handsome; but they do not bear transportation to civilized life (any
more than some of the native wines do): they accept no intellectual
culture; and they lose their beauty as they grow old. What then? The
young English blade, who was intoxicated by beauty into an injudicious
match and might, as the proverb says, have gone insane if he could not
have made it, takes to drink now, and so fulfills the other alternative.
Alas! the fatal gift of beauty.

But I do not think Capri is so dangerous as it is represented. For
(of course we went to Capri) neither at the marina, w