Costanza are now hid in mist.  We halt for consultation.  Shall we go on and brave a wetting, or ignominiously retreat?  There are many opinions, but few decided ones.  The drivers declare that it will be a bad time.  One gentleman, with an air of decision, suggests that it is best to go on, or go back, if we do not stand here and wait.  The deaf lady, from near Dublin, being appealed to, says that, perhaps, if it is more prudent, we had better go back if it is going to rain.  It does rain.  Waterproofs are put on, umbrellas spread, backs turned to the wind; and we look like a group of explorers under adverse circumstances, “silent on a peak in Darien,” the donkeys especially downcast and dejected.  Finally, as is usual in life, a, compromise prevails.  We decide to continue for half an hour longer and see what the weather is.  No sooner have we set forward over the brow of a hill than it grows lighter on the sea horizon in the southwest, the ruins on the peak become visible, Capri is in full sunlight.  The clouds lift more and more, and still hanging overhead, but with no more rain, are like curtains gradually drawn up, opening to us a glorious vista of sunshine and promise, an illumined, sparkling, illimitable sea, and a bright foreground of slopes and picturesque rocks.  Before the half hour is up, there is not one of the party who does not claim to have been the person who insisted upon going forward.

We halt for a moment to look at Capri, that enormous, irregular rock, raising its huge back out of the sea, its back broken in the middle, with the little village for a saddle.  On the farther summit, above Anacapri, a precipice of two thousand feet sheer down to the water on the other side, hangs a light cloud.  The east elevation, whence the playful Tiberius used to amuse his green old age by casting his prisoners eight hundred feet down into the sea, has the strong sunlight on it; and below, the row of tooth-like rocks, which are the extreme eastern point, shine in a warm glow.  We descend through a village, twisting about in its crooked streets.  The inhabitants, who do not see strangers every day, make free to stare at and comment on us, and even laugh at something that seems very comical in our appearance; which shows how ridiculous are the costumes of Paris and New York in some places.  Stalwart girls, with only an apology for clothes, with bare legs, brown faces, and beautiful eyes, stop in their spinning, holding the distaff suspended, while they examine us at leisure.  At our left, as we turn from the church and its sunny piazza, where old women sit and gabble, down the ravine, is a snug village under the mountain by the shore, with a great square medieval tower.  On the right, upon rocky points, are remains of round towers, and temples perhaps.