On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the Blue Grotto, and we descended to take one of them.  The fixed rate is a franc for each person.  The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us.  We explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy, we were not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be eaten.  We retired to our vantage ground on the heights.  The guides called us to the beach again.  They would take us for three francs apiece, or say six francs for both of us.  We withdrew furious to the heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on the beach, “You had better take these signori for a just price.  They are going to the syndic to complain of you.”  At which there arose a lamentable outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one voice for us to come down and go for a franc apiece.  This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in their hands at home, we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they are afraid of the law.

We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the patriarch—­for I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew—­when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the sea.  Here and there, where their swarthy fronts were softened with a little verdure, goat-paths wound up and down among the rocks; and midway between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths—­baths of Augustus, says Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor of their infamous hero.  Howbeit, this was all we saw on the way to the Blue Grotto.  Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling to, had we been upset and washed against them—­and we began to talk of the immortality of the soul.  As we neared the grotto, the patriarch entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of people who insisted upon entering it in stormy weather,—­especially of a French painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept alive only on rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto with a bottle-full at a time.  “And behold us arrived, gentlemen!” said he, as he brought the boat skillfully around in front of the small semicircular opening at the base of the lofty bluff.  We lie flat on the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion of that part of our clothing which the driving torrents of rain had spared.  The wave of destiny rises with us upon its breast—­sinks, and we are inside of the Blue Grotto.  Not so much blue as gray, however, and the water about the mouth of it green rather than azure.  They say that on a sunny day both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the vividest cerulean tint—­and I saw the grotto