ivor--stripped in the sea and landed
without a stitch--yet they took no more interest in me than you do in
Italian organ-grinders. They were decent enough. I didn't have to
pick and steal for a square meal and a pair of trousers; it would have
been more exciting if I had. But what a place! Napoleon couldn't
stand it, you remember, but he held on longer than I did. I put in a
few weeks in their infernal mines, simply to pick up a smattering of
Italian; then got across to the mainland in a little wooden
timber-tramp; and ungratefully glad I was to leave Elba blazing in just
such another sunset as the one you won't forget.

"The tramp was bound for Naples, but first it touched at Baiae, where I
carefully deserted in the night. There are too many English in Naples
itself, though I thought it would make a first happy hunting-ground
when I knew the language better and had altered myself a bit more.
Meanwhile I got a billet of several sorts on one of the loveliest spots
that ever I struck on all my travels. The place was a vineyard, but it
overhung the sea, and I got taken on as tame sailorman and emergency
bottle-washer. The wages were the noble figure of a lira and a half,
which is just over a bob, a day, but there were lashings of sound wine
for one and all, and better wine to bathe in. And for eight whole
months, my boy, I was an absolutely honest man. The luxury of it,
Bunny! I out-heroded Herod, wouldn't touch a grape, and went in the
most delicious danger of being knifed for my principles by the thieving
crew I had joined.

"It was the kind of place where every prospect pleases--and all the
rest of it--especially all the rest. But may I see it in my dreams
till I die--as it was in the beginning--before anything began to
happen. It was a wedge of rock sticking out into the bay, thatched
with vines, and with the rummiest old house on the very edge of all, a
devil of a height above the sea: you might have sat at the windows and
dropped your Sullivan-ends plumb into blue water a hundred and fifty
feet below.

"From the garden behind the house--such a garden, Bunny--oleanders and
mimosa, myrtles, rosemarys and red tangles of fiery, untamed
flowers--in a corner of this garden was the top of a subterranean stair
down to the sea; at least there were nearly two hundred steps tunnelled
through the solid rock; then an iron gate, and another eighty steps in
the open air; and last of all a cave fit for pirates,
a-pe