with me is the cadence of their speech. Whilst I was breakfasting,
two women stood at gossip on a near balcony, and their utterance was
a curious exaggeration of the Neapolitan accent; every sentence rose
to a high note, and fell away in a long curve of sound, sometimes a
musical wail, more often a mere whining. The protraction of the last
word or two was really astonishing; again and again I fancied that
the speaker had broken into song. I cannot say that the effect was
altogether pleasant; in the end such talk would tell severely on
civilized nerves, but it harmonized with the coloured houses, the
luxuriant vegetation, the strange odours, the romantic landscape.

In front of the vehicle were three little horses; behind it was
hitched an old shabby two-wheeled thing, which we were to leave
somewhere for repairs. With whip-cracking and vociferation, amid
good-natured farewells from the crowd, we started away. It was just
ten o'clock.

At once the road began to climb, and nearly three hours were spent
in reaching the highest point of the mountain barrier. Incessantly
winding, often doubling upon itself, the road crept up the sides of
profound gorges, and skirted many a precipice; bridges innumerable
spanned the dry ravines which at another season are filled with
furious torrents. From the zone of orange and olive and cactus we
passed that of beech and oak, noble trees now shedding their
rich-hued foliage on bracken crisped and brown; here I noticed the
feathery bowers of wild clematis ("old man's beard"), and many a
spike of the great mullein, strange to me because so familiar in
English lanes. Through mists that floated far below I looked over
miles of shore, and outward to the ever-rising limit of sea and sky.
Very lovely were the effects of light, the gradations of colour;