ight
and busy world of traffic and pleasure. Between the houses coloured
coral-pink, white, blue, and yellow, and the pale green transparent water
lies a long stretch of beach covered with every sort of craft that sails
the Mediterranean, and with a motley crowd of fishermen, tourists and
noisy children; whilst the whole atmosphere rings with raucous voices
raised in giving directions, in quarrelling, or in addressing the many
perplexed strangers. We disembark, and cross the intervening beach with
its sea-weed veiled boulders and masses of tawny fishing nets; we reach
the village, and here we meet with our first disappointment in romantic
Capri. It was not so very many years ago, barely thirty in point of fact,
that this island was roadless, and in those primitive days the visitor was
met at the Marina Grande by tall strapping Capriote women, who were wont
to seize the traveller's pieces of baggage as though they had been light
parcels, and to march up the old stone staircase poising these burdens on
their heads with the carriage of an empress. The stranger's own entrance
into Capri was less dignified, for either he had to toil painfully in the
blazing sun up that steep picturesque flight of steps and reach the
plateau above, perspiring and probably out of temper; or else he was
compelled to bestride a miserable ass which a bare-footed damsel steered
upward by means of the quadruped's tail. Nowadays, we are spared this
original and somewhat humiliating manner of arrival at our journey's end.
There are little _carrozzelle_, drawn by clever black Abruzzi cobs
awaiting us, and even one or two hotel conveyances. We find ourselves
being driven rapidly up the excellent winding road constructed only a
quarter of a century ago, past the domed Church of San Costanzo, the
patron Saint of the Caprioti, past hedges of aloe and prickly pear, until
we gain the saddle of the island-mountain, where stands the small capital
perched upon a ledge that overlooks the Bay of Naples to the north, and to
the south the endless expanse of the unruffled Tyrrhene.

It is evident even to the most casual untrained eye, that this huge mass
of sea-girt rock whereon we stand must in remote ages have formed part of
the mainland opposite, until some fierce convulsion of nature, common
enough in this region that is ever changing its outward face through
subterranean forces, tore what is now Capri asunder from the Punta della
Campanella, and placed the sea