A few weeks subsequent to the last related circumstances of our story, Domitius Afer, with nothing better to occupy his time, on a certain afternoon, indulged an inclination for gentle exercise and solitary reflection, and took his meditative way up the gradual ascent which led to the eastern cliffs of the island of Capreae. The highest elevation at this end of the island is the extreme north‐eastern promontory. Thereon stood an extensive villa of the Emperor, which formed, for the most part, his favourite residence. The suspicious nature of Tiberius had not deemed its erection complete and satisfactory until it had been surrounded by what an ordinary observer might have deemed the superfluity of a strong fortification. It stood there in all the glory of its new, gleaming, white masonry—a pile wellnigh impregnable to anything but starvation, surveying island and sea and mainland for leagues, with the waves roaring a thousand feet below around the base of the perpendicular cliffs. This residence bore the name of the villa of Jove, and, although it claimed preference, on account of the magnificent prospect which it enjoyed, together with the natural strength of its position, it was only one of some dozen which had arisen at the Emperor’s bidding, or were building, in various parts of the island, each of them named after a deity. Thus the ruler of the world was enabled to change his abode according to his whim, or oftener, perhaps, to the workings of his subtle, mistrustful spirit. Leaving this favoured retreat of the Emperor on his left hand, the knight went some distance further along the brow of the cliffs, and wrapping his cloak closer around him, he sat down in a nook of the limestone cliffs in order to indulge more fully in a fit of abstraction. The scene, which was displayed before him, has excited the raptures of gazers of all ages. But it was the better fortune of those of antiquity to be able to see it at its brightest, when its natural loveliness was embellished by the citizens of an empire in the fulness of its power and wealth, and ere a most melancholy‐famous eruption of nature had cruelly defaced it for ever. So precipitous were the cliffs upon which the feet of the Roman knight rested, that a stone, flung from beside him, would have dropped plumb into the waters below. Thence, from this point of vantage, the delighted eye drank in the matchless panorama which circled before it under the clearest of skies.