The party is at length mounted, and clatters away through the narrow streets.  Donkey-riding is very good for people who think they cannot walk.  It looks very much like riding, to a spectator; and it deceives the person undertaking it into an amount of exercise equal to walking.  I have a great admiration for the donkey character.  There never was such patience under wrong treatment, such return of devotion for injury.  Their obstinacy, which is so much talked about, is only an exercise of the right of private judgment, and an intelligent exercise of it, no doubt, if we could take the donkey point of view, as so many of us are accused of doing in other things.  I am certain of one thing:  in any large excursion party there will be more obstinate people than obstinate donkeys; and yet the poor brutes get all the thwacks and thumps.  We are bound to-day for the Punta della Campanella, the extreme point of the promontory, and ten miles away.  The path lies up the steps from the new Massa carriage-road, now on the backbone of the ridge, and now in the recesses of the broken country.  What an animated picture is the donkeycade, as it mounts the steeps, winding along the zigzags!  Hear the little bridlebells jingling, the drivers groaning their “a-e-ugh, a-e-ugh,” the riders making a merry din of laughter, and firing off a fusillade of ejaculations of delight and wonder.

The road is between high walls; round the sweep of curved terraces which rise above and below us, bearing the glistening olive; through glens and gullies; over and under arches, vine-grown,—­how little we make use of the arch at home!—­round sunny dells where orange orchards gleam; past shrines, little chapels perched on rocks, rude villas commanding most extensive sweeps of sea and shore.  The almond trees are in full bloom, every twig a thickly-set spike of the pink and white blossoms; daisies and dandelions are out; the purple crocuses sprinkle the ground, the petals exquisitely varied on the reverse side, and the stamens of bright salmon color; the large double anemones have come forth, certain that it is spring; on the higher crags by the wayside the Mediterranean heather has shaken out its delicate flowers, which fill the air with a mild fragrance; while blue violets, sweet of scent like the English, make our path a perfumed one.  And this is winter.

We have made a late start, owing to the fact that everybody is captain of the expedition, and to the Sorrento infirmity that no one is able to make up his mind about anything.  It is one o’clock when we reach a high transverse ridge, and find the headlands of the peninsula rising before us, grim hills of limestone, one of them with the ruins of a convent on top, and no road apparent thither, and Capri ahead of us in the sea, the only bit of land that catches any light; for as we have journeyed the sky has thickened, the clouds of the sirocco have come up from the south; there has been first a mist, and then a fine rain; the ruins on the peak of Santa