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.

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