I had sat down on some fragment of wall directly overhanging the sea. In my present mood it afforded me a singular kind of pleasure to take up stones or pieces of marble and throw them down the precipice. From time to time I could hear them striking against the sharp projections of the rocks as they leaped down the giddy height. Should I let my violin follow in their wake? I was in a mood of savage despair; a mood in which my heart turned at bay on what I had best loved. Hither it had led me, this art I had worshiped! After years of patient toil, after sacrificing to it hearth and home, and the security of a settled profession, I was not a tittle further advanced than at the commencement of my career. For requital of my devoted service, starvation stared me in the face. My miserable subsistence was barely earned by giving lessons to females, young and old, who, while inflicting prolonged tortures on their victim, still exacted the tribute of smiles and compliments. Weakened and ill, I shuddered to think of returning and bowing my neck once more to that detested yoke. "No! I'll never go back to that!" I cried, jumping up. "I'll sooner earn a precarious livelihood by turning fisherman in this island! Any labor will be preferable to that daily renewing torture." I seized my violin in a desperate clutch, and feverishly leant over the wall, where I could hear the dirge-like boom of the breakers in the hollow caves. Only he who is familiar with the violin knows the love one may bear it--a love keen as that felt for some frail human creature of exquisitely delicate mold. Caressingly I passed my fingers over its ever-responsive strings, thinking, feeling rather, that I could endure no hand to handle it save mine! No! rather than that it should belong to another, its strings should for ever render up the ghost of music in one prolonged wail, as it plunged shivering from this fearful height. For the last time, I thought, my fingers erred over its familiar chords. A thrill of horrid exultation possessed me, such as the fell Tiberius may have experienced when he bade his men hurl the shrinking form of a soft-limbed favorite from this precipice. Possibly my shaken nerves were affected by the hideous memories clinging to these unhallowed ruins; possibly also by the oppressive heat of the day. Sea and sky, indeed, looked in harmony with unnatural sensations; as though some dread burst of passion were gathering intensity under their apparently sluggish calm. Though the sky overhead was of a sultry blue, yet above the coast-line of Naples, standing out with preternatural distinctness, uncouth, livid clouds straggled chaotically to the upper sky, here and there reaching lank, shadowy films, like gigantic arms, far into the zenith. Flocks of sea-birds were uneasily flying landward; screaming, they wheeled round the sphinx-like rocks, and disappeared by degrees in their red clefts and fissures.