“Monsieur le Comte,

“I am distressed that your excellency did not think fit to charge me with your commissions for Naples.  I should have executed them with a fidelity which would have convinced you of the grateful recollection I retain of your kind offices.

    “Accept, M. le Comte, the assurance of those lively sentiments
    which I entertain towards you, and of which, one day or other,
    I hope to give you proof.

    “ALEX.  DUMAS.”

    “Naples, 23d Aug. 1835.”

With the crew of this speronara we became as familiar as with the personages of a novel; and, indeed, about this time the novelist begins to predominate over the tourist.

On leaving the bay of Naples our traveller first makes for the island of Capri.  The greatest curiosity which he here visits and describes in the azure grotto.  He and his companion are rowed, each in a small skiff, to a narrow dark aperture upon the rocky coast, and which appears the darker from its contrast with the white surf that is dashing about it.  He is told to lie down on his back in the boat, to protect his head from a concussion against the low roof.

“In a moment after I was borne upon the surge—­the bark glided on with rapidity—­I saw nothing but a dark rock, which seemed for a second to be weighing on my chest.  Then on a sudden I found myself in a grotto so marvellous that I uttered a cry of astonishment, and started up in my admiration with a bound which endangered the frail bark on which I stood.

“I had before me, around me, above me, beneath me, a perfect enchantment, which words cannot describe, and which the pencil would utterly fail to give any impression of.  Imagine an immense cavern, all pure azure—­as if God had made a tent there with some residue of the firmament; a surface of water so limpid, so transparent, that you seem to float on air:  above you, the pendant stalactites, huge and fantastical, reversed pyramids and pinnacles:  below you a sand of gold mingled with marine vegetation; and around the margin of cave, where it is bathed by the water, the coral shooting out its capricious and glittering branches.  That narrow entrance which, from the sea, showed like a dark spot, now shone at one end a luminous point, the solitary star which gave its subdued light to this fairy palace; whilst at the opposite extremity a sort of alcove led on the imagination to expect new wonders, or perhaps the apparition of the nymph or goddess of the place.

“In all probability the azure grotto was unknown to the ancients.  No poet speaks of it; and surely with their marvellous imagination the Greeks could not have failed to make it the palace of some marine goddess, and to have transmitted to us her history.  The sea, perhaps, was higher than it is now, and the secrets of this cave were known only to Amphitrite and her court of sirens, naiads, and tritons.