There is a little terrace and flower-plat, where we sometimes sit, and over the wall of which we like to lean, and look down the cliff to the sea.  This terrace is the common ground of many exotics as well as native trees and shrubs.  Here are the magnolia, the laurel, the Japanese medlar, the oleander, the pepper, the bay, the date-palm, a tree called the plumbago, another from the Cape of Good Hope, the pomegranate, the elder in full leaf, the olive, salvia, heliotrope; close by is a banana-tree.

I find a good deal of companionship in the rows of plaster busts that stand on the wall, in all attitudes of listlessness, and all stages of decay.  I thought at first they were penates of the premises; but better acquaintance has convinced me that they never were gods, but the clayey representations of great men and noble dames.  The stains of time are on them; some have lost a nose or an ear; and one has parted with a still more important member—­his head,—­an accident that might profitably have befallen his neighbor, whose curly locks and villainously low forehead proclaim him a Roman emperor.  Cut in the face of the rock is a walled and winding way down to the water.  I see below the archway where it issues from the underground recesses of our establishment; and there stands a bust, in serious expectation that some one will walk out and saunter down among the rocks; but no one ever does.  Just at the right is a little beach, with a few old houses, and a mimic stir of life, a little curve in the cliff, the mouth of the gorge, where the waves come in with a lazy swash.  Some fishing-boats ride there; and the shallow water, as I look down this sunny morning, is thickly strewn with floating peels of oranges and lemons, as if some one was brewing a gigantic bowl of punch.  And there is an uncommon stir of life; for a schooner is shipping a cargo of oranges, and the entire population is in a clamor.  Donkeys are coming down the winding way, with a heavy basket on either flank; stout girls are stepping lightly down with loads on their heads; the drivers shout, the donkeys bray, the people jabber and order each other about; and the oranges, in a continual stream, are poured into the long, narrow vessel, rolling in with a thud, until there is a yellow mass of them.  Shouting, scolding, singing, and braying, all come up to me a little mellowed.  The disorder is not so great as on the opera stage of San Carlo in Naples; and the effect is much more pleasing.

This settlement, the marina, under the cliff, used to extend along the shore; and a good road ran down there close by the water.  The rock has split off, and covered it; and perhaps the shore has sunk.  They tell me that those who dig down in the edge of the shallow water find sunken walls, and the remains of old foundations of Roman workmanship.  People who wander there pick up bits of marble, serpentine, and malachite,—­remains of the palaces that long ago fell into the sea, and have not left even the names of their owners and builders,-the ancient loafers who idled away their days as everybody must in this seductive spot.  Not far from here, they point out the veritable caves of the Sirens, who have now shut up house, and gone away, like the rest of the nobility.  If I had been a mariner in their day, I should have made no effort to sail by and away from their soothing shore.