be a bandit himself. He cracked his whip loudly as they rolled along, and every now and then gave a long shrill whistle. Mrs Ashe was sure that these were signals to his band, who were lurking somewhere on the olive-hung hillsides. She thought she detected him once or twice making signs to certain questionable- looking characters as they passed, and she fancied that the people they met gazed at them with an air of commiseration, as upon victims who were being carried to execution. Her fears affected Katy, so, though they talked and laughed, and made jokes to amuse Amy, who must not be scared or led to suppose that anything was amiss, and to the outward view seemed a very merry party, they were privately quaking in their shoes all the way, and enjoying a deal of highly superfluous misery. And after all they reached Sorrento in perfect safety, and the driver, who looked so dangerous, turned out to be a respectable young man enough, with a wife and family to support, who considered a plateful of macaroni and a glass of sour red wine as the height of luxury, and was grateful for a small gratuity of thirty cents or so, which would enable him to purchase these dainties. Mrs Ashe had a very bad headache next day, to pay for her fright, but she and Katy agreed that they had been very foolish, and resolved to pay no more attention to unaccredited rumours or allow them to spoil their enjoyment, which was a sensible resolution to make.
Their hotel was perched directly over the sea. From the balcony of their sitting room they looked down a sheer cliff some sixty feet high, into the water; their bedrooms opened on a garden of roses, with an orange grove beyond. Not far from them was the great gorge which cuts the little town of Sorrento almost in two, and whose seaward end makes the harbour of the place. Katy was never tired of peering down into this strange and beautiful cleft, whose sides, two hundred feet in depth, are hung with vines and trailing growths of all sorts, and seem all a-tremble with the fairy fronds of maiden-hair ferns growing out of every chink and crevice. She and Amy took walks along the coast toward Massa, to look at the lovely island shapes in the bay, and admire the great clumps of cactus and Spanish bayonet which grew by the roadside, and they always came back loaded with orange flowers, which could be picked as freely as apple blossoms from New England orchards in the spring. The oranges themselves at that time of the year were very sour, but to Katy and her friends they might have been the sweetest in the world.
They made two different excursions to Pompeii, which is within easy distance of Sorrento. They scrambled on donkeys over the hills, and had glimpses of the far-away Calabrian shore, of the natural arch, and the temples of Paestum shining in the sun many miles distant. On Katy's birthday, which fell towards the end of January, Mrs Ashe let her have her choice of a treat, and she elected to go to the island of Capri, which none of them had seen. It turned out a perfect day, with sea and wind exactly right for the sail, and to allow of getting into the famous `Blue Grotto', which can only be entered under particular conditions of tide and weather. They climbed the great cliff rise at the island's end, and saw the ruins of the villa built by the wicked emperor Tiberius, and the awful place known as his `Leap', down which, it is said, he made his victims throw themselves; and they lunched at a hotel which bore his name, and just at sunset pushed off again for the row home over the charmed sea. This return voyage was almost the pleasantest thing of all the day. The water was smooth, the moon at its full. It was larger and more brilliant than American moons are, and seemed to possess an actual warmth and colour. The boatmen timed their oar strokes to the cadence of Neapolitan barcaroles and folk songs, full of rhythmic movement, which seemed caught from the pulsing tides. And when at last the bow grated on the sands of the Sorrento landing place, Katy drew a long, regretful breath, and declared that this was her best birthday gift of all, better than Amy's flowers, or the pretty tortoise-shell locket that Mrs Ashe had given her, better even than the letter from home, which, timed by happy accident, had arrived by the morning's post to make a bright opening for the day.
But all pleasant things must come to an end.
`Katy,' said Mrs Ashe, one afternoon in early February, `I heard some ladies talking just now in the salon, and they said that Rome is filling up very fast. The carnival begins in less than two weeks. If we don't make haste we shall not be able to get any rooms.'