so represented in the windows of the paint-shops at Naples.  But to my own experience it did not differ from other caves in color or form:  there was the customary clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping water; the sense of dull and stupid solitude,—­a little relieved in this case by the mighty music of the waves breaking against the rocks outside.  The grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradually down to the water.  Valery says that some remains of a gallery have caused the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of Tiberius’s pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was led to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri on the mountain top.  The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one corner of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories; but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably tired at last of hearing Tiberius so much talked about.

We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul.  He was staying in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a fortnight there.

We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his household to present the account,—­each one full of visible longing, yet restrained from asking buonamano by a strong sense of previous contract.  It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered themselves, and blessed us as we departed.  The pretty muletress took leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in silence.  As we drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea.  Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso,—­in which the novelist Cooper also resided when in Sorrento,—­a white house not handsomer nor uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water.  The bluffs are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fishermen’s boats, and here and there a devious stairway mounts to their crests.  Up one of these we walked, noting how in the house above us the people, with that puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out.  There was nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli; and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze at this moment.