By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain, very near the ruins of the palaces, “Here,” said the patriarch, “it is customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius.”  We obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord—­a white-toothed, brown-faced, good-humored peasant—­gallantly ran forward and presented the ladies with bouquets of roses.  We thought it a pretty and graceful act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty and graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented the ladies with flowers,—­yet he equally gave me his benediction when I refused to pay for his politeness.

“Now here,” again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, “you can see the Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you hire the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six francs.”  The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an immediate Tarantella.  The muletresses left their beasts to browse about the door of the inn and came into the little public room, where were already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their places vis-a-vis, while the landlord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild and lively measure.  The women were barefooted and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of dancers.  They swayed themselves in time with the music; then, filled with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled away;—­snapping their fingers above their heads, and looking over their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other, they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing, and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon the brain like the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine and complete any representation of that indescribable dance.  Heaven knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must confess, could only burlesque some of her niece’s airiest movements, and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable.  She earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the dance was over, and went contentedly back to her mule.

The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with which he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them.  These have taken their place in the insular imagination as Christian martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls were any thing but