boat nor cargo are yours, and you have to earn that share by harder work
and with greater anxiety than the rest. But the world is green to-day.
You remember a certain night last March--off Cape Orso in the gulf, when
the wind they call the Punti di Salerno was raging down and you had a
jib bent for a mainsail, and your foresail close reefed and were
shipping more green water than you like to think of. Pitch dark, too,
and the little lighthouse on the cape not doing its best, as it seemed.
The long line of the Salerno lights on the weather bow. No getting
there, either, and no getting anywhere else apparently. Then you tried
your luck. Amalfi might not be blowing. It was no joke to go about just
then, but you managed it somehow, because you had half a dozen brave
fellows with you. As she came up she was near missing stays and you sang
out to let go the main halyards. The yard came down close by your head
and nearly killed you, but she paid-off all right and went over on the
starboard tack. Just under the cape the water was smooth. Just beyond it
the devil was loose with all his angels, for Amalfi was blowing its own
little hurricane on its own account from another quarter. Nothing for it
but to go about and try Salerno again. What could you do in an open
felucca with the green water running over? You did your best. Five hours
out of that pitch black night you beat up, first trying one harbour and
then the other. Amalfi gave in first, just as the waning moon rose, and
you got under the breakwater at last.

You remember that last of your many narrow escapes to-day as you trudge
up the stony mule-track through the green valleys, and it strikes you
that after all it is easier to walk from Diamante all the way to
Verbicaro, than to face a March storm in the gulf of Salerno in an open
boat on a dark night. Up you go, past that strange ruin of the great
Norman-Saracen castle standing alone on the steep little hill which
rises out of the middle of the valley, commanding the roads on the right