I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers growing wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic charm.  Here—­where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires in the awful similitude of Nature’s harmless and lovely forms, and showered its destroying petals all abroad—­was it not tragic to find again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the earth’s immortal life?  Of them that planted and tended and plucked and bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children of the summer, what witness in the world?  Only the crouching skeletons under the tables.  Alas and alas!

V.

The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners.  How ghastly the thought of it was!  If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there—­as we did not—­we could not have suffered more than we did.  They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and this was all there was left in Herculaneum to see.

“Is there nothing else?” we demand of the custodian.

“Signori, this is all.”

“It is mighty little.”

“Perdoni, signori! ma——.”

“Well,” we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of the pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, “it is a good thing to know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing.”

X.

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.

I.

I have no doubt

  “Calm Capri waits,”

where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may choose to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that it was on exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed, disappear in its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases to play as soon as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic display, and all marvelously grand and lovely things make haste to prove their impermanence.

We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last chose a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o’clock, and burst into frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon The first half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to Castellamare, whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and rapture,—­winding along the steep shore of the sea, and under the brows of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty weather, and caught here and there the sunshine on their tops.  In that heavenly climate no day can