oes, purple-headed
cauliflowers, all the broccoli and many others to be observed are old
familiar friends, but who in England ever saw such gorgeous objects on a
coster's stall or in a green-grocer's shop as the yellow, scarlet and
shining green pods of the _peperoni_, or the banana-shaped egg-plants of
iridescent purple, or the split pumpkins, revealing caverns of
saffron-hued pulp within? Truly, the Sorrentine market contains a feast of
colour to satisfy the craving of an artist!

At vintage time the whole Piano di Sorrento reeks with the vinous scent of
the spilt juice, that is carelessly thrown on to the stone-paved roads by
the jolting of the country carts which bring in the great wooden tubs, so
that the very streets seem to run with the crimson ooze. Slender youths in
yet more slender clothing, with legs purple-stained from treading the
grapes (for in the South wine is still made on the primitive plan), are to
be met with on all sides, playing at their favourite game of bowls on the
public road, in order to relieve their brains of the pungent fumes of the
fermenting grape juice. Somehow at the very thought of a Campanian vintage
with its long hot dusty days, its bare-legged brown-skinned peasants
treading the pulp, and its all-pervading aroma of wine-lees, there rise to
memory the truly inspired lines of John Keats:

"O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth."

But all these joys of odorous gardens made musical by nightingales, of
morning plunges into the blue Mediterranean, of the wealth of southern
fruit and the novel delights of the vintage are not for the winter
traveller, who had far better spend the December or January days of his
visit to the Bay in a steam-heated Neapolitan hotel, rather than face the
cold and wet in a Sorrentine inn on its overhanging cliff. Nevertheless
the warm autumn often extends itself into a continuous St Martin's summer,
that lasts almost until the New Year, before skies grow clouded and the
snow-flakes descend upon the vineyards and the lava streams of Vesuvius.
Nothing can be pleasanter in fact than some of the long walks in a sharp
exhilarating air, and though days are short an