We like to talk about Capri, and to talk of going there.  The Sorrento people have no end of gossip about the wild island; and, simple and primitive as they are, Capri is still more out of the world.  I do not know what enchantment there is on the island; but —­whoever sets foot there, they say, goes insane or dies a drunkard.  I fancy the reason of this is found in the fact that the Capri girls are raving beauties.  I am not sure but the monotony of being anchored off there in the bay, the monotony of rocks and precipices that goats alone can climb, the monotony of a temperature that scarcely ever, winter and summer, is below 55 or above 75 Fahrenheit indoors, might drive one into lunacy.  But I incline to think it is due to the handsome Capri girls.

There are beautiful girls in Sorrento, with a beauty more than skin deep, a glowing, hidden fire, a ripeness like that of the grape and the peach which grows in the soft air and the sun.  And they wither, like grapes that hang upon the stem.  I have never seen a handsome, scarcely a decent-looking, old woman here.  They are lank and dry, and their bones are covered with parchment.  One of these brown-cheeked girls, with large, longing eyes, gives the stranger a start, now and then, when he meets her in a narrow way with a basket of oranges on her head.  I hope he has the grace to go right by.  Let him meditate what this vision of beauty will be like in twenty ears.

The Capri girls are famed as magnificent beauties, but they fade like their mainland sisters.  The Saracens used to descend on their island, and carry them off to their harems.  The English, a very adventurous people, who have no harems, have followed the Saracens.  The young lords and gentlemen have a great fondness for Capri.  I hear gossip enough about elopements, and not seldom marriages, with the island girls,—­bright girls, with the Greek mother-wit, and surpassingly handsome; but they do not bear transportation to civilized life (any more than some of the native wines do):  they accept no intellectual culture; and they lose their beauty as they grow old.  What then?  The young English blade, who was intoxicated by beauty into an injudicious match and might, as the proverb says, have gone insane if he could not have made it, takes to drink now, and so fulfills the other alternative.  Alas! the fatal gift of beauty.

But I do not think Capri is so dangerous as it is represented.  For (of course we went to Capri) neither at the marina, where a crowd of bare-legged, vociferous maidens with donkeys assailed us, nor in the village above, did I see many girls for whom and one little isle a person would forswear the world.  But I can believe that they grow here.  One of our donkey girls was a handsome, dark-skinned, black-eyed girl; but her little sister, a mite of a being of six years, who could scarcely step over the small stones in the road, and was forced to lead the donkey by her sister in order to establish another lien on us