ly from the
majestic isolation of a railway compartment or a hired carriage cannot
possibly give the traveller the smallest insight into the ordinary phases
of local life; for he is ever looking, as it were, into a picture from
which all trace of colour has vanished.

It is but a short quarter of an hour by train from Torre Annunziata to
Castellamare di Stabia, the ill-fated Stabiae of the Romans, which shared
the evil lot of Pompeii and Herculaneum. On our right we have the sea,
with the castle-topped islet of Revigliano, whilst on looking to the left
we can survey the fertile valley of the Sarno, and the shapeless mounds
which hide that precious goal of every traveller to these shores, the
buried city of Pompeii. Everywhere thrives sub-tropical vegetation:--cactus
and aloe draped in wreaths of smilax; tall straggling masses of scarlet
geranium that cling for protection to the Indian fig, and blossom in
security amid their spiky but safe retreats; shrubs of fragrant yellow
genista; clumps of purple-leaved _ricini_, as the Italians name the
castor-oil plant. If it were summer time, the daturas would be covered
with their great white floral trumpets, and every oleander bush would be
one blaze of the coarse carmine blossoms that are here called _Mazza di
San Giuseppe_, or St Joseph's nosegay, and a very gaudy rank bouquet they
make. But in spring-time the oleander can but display long greyish leaves
and pods of snowy fluff, which is blown hither and thither like
thistle-down on the air; and it is only in flaming summer that these
regions are brightened by St Joseph's flower, or by the still more
gorgeous masses of the mesembryanthemum, which clambers on all sides over
the lava rock and hangs in crimson festoons from tufa cliffs, making
impossibly splendid splashes of colour in the landscape.

* * * * * * *

So many writers have expatiated upon the sordid ugliness of Castellamare
and upon the beauty of the wooded slopes above the town, that a further
description of the place may well be dispensed with. Uninteresting,
however, as this industrial town appears, it boasts a long historical
record, to which its crumbling medieval castle bears witness. The great
Emperor Frederick the Second, the scholar-pope Pius the Second, and all
the monarchs of the Angevin, Aragonese and Bourbon dynasties have been
associated with this "castle by the sea." The whole district was once the
property of that h