ght-illuminated or a
shadowed facet of the moving mass was turned to sight.

Half-way across the gulf the sirocco lulled; the sail was lowered, and
we had to make the rest of the passage by rowing. Under the lee of
Ischia we got into comparatively quiet water; though here the beautiful
Italian sea was yellowish green with churned-up sand, like an unripe
orange. We passed the castle on its rocky island, with the domed church
which has been so often painted in _gouache_ pictures through the last
two centuries, and soon after noon we came to Casamicciola.

LA PICCOLA SENTINELLA.

Casamicciola is a village on the north side of the island, in its
centre, where the visitors to the mineral baths of Ischia chiefly
congregate. One of its old-established inns is called La Piccola
Sentinella. The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with a pink
wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays of thick-clustering
scarlet and magenta flowers. This is a rambling house, built in
successive stages against a hill, with terraces and verandahs opening
on unexpected gardens to the back and front. Beneath its long irregular
facade there spreads a wilderness of orange-trees and honeysuckles and
roses, verbenas, geraniums and mignonette, snapdragons, gazenias and
stocks, exceeding bright and fragrant, with the green slopes of Monte
Epomeo for a background and Vesuvius for far distance. There are
wonderful bits of detail in this garden. One dark, thick-foliaged olive,
I remember, leaning from the tufa over a lizard-haunted wall, feathered
waist-high in huge acanthus-leaves. The whole rich orchard ground of
Casamicciola is dominated by Monte Epomeo, the extinct volcano which may
be called the _raison d'etre_ of Ischia; for this island is nothing but
a mountain lifted by the energy of fire from the sea-basement. Its
fantastic peaks and ridges, sulphur-coloured, dusty grey, and tawny,
with brushwood in young leaf upon the cloven flanks, form a singular
pendant to the austere but more artistically modelled limestone crags of
Capri. Not two islands that I know, within so short a space of sea,
offer two pictures so different in style and quality of loveliness. The
inhabitants are equally distinct in type. Here, in spite of what De
Musset wrote somewhat affectedly about the peasant girls--

Ischia! c'est la qu'on a des yeux,
C'est la qu'un corsage amoureux
Serre la hanche.
Sur un bas rouge bien tire
Bril