In the year 1851 the palace of these splendid Rufoli, which in the time of Roger of Sicily had housed ninety knights with their men at arms, had fallen to tragical decay. A great landslide in the Fifteenth Century destroyed the harbour of Amalfi; hid its great quays and warehouses, its broad streets and roaring markets beneath the sea, and reduced it from a powerful Republic, the rival of Venice and Genoa, to a mere fishing village. A little later the plague followed, and decimated the now poverty-stricken inhabitants of Ravello, and then the great nobles began to drift away to Naples, came more and more rarely to visit their Calabrian seats, and these gradually sank in the course of time into ruin and decay. Fortunately in the year before mentioned a rich English traveller, making the still fashionable “grand tour,” happened into Ravello, saw the possibilities of this crumbling castle set upon one of the most beautiful sites in the world, and promptly purchased it from its indifferent Neapolitan 37owner. He, much absorbed in the opera dancers and the small intrigues of the city, was secretly and scornfully amused that a mad Englishman should be willing to part with so much good hard money in exchange for ivied towers and gaping arches in a remote country town. The Englishman mended the arches, strengthened the towers, gathered up from among the weeds the delicate sculptures and twisted columns, destroyed nothing, preserved and restored with a reverent hand, and made for himself one of the loveliest homes in all Italy. It was in that charming garden, swung high upon a spur of the glorious coast, that Jane and Peripatetica contracted that passion for Ravello which haunted them with a homesickness for it all through Sicily. For never again did they find anywhere such views, such shadowed green ways of ilex and cypress, such ivy-mantled towers, such roses, such sheets of daffodils and blue hyacinths. They dreamed there through the long day, regretting that their luggage had been sent on to Sicily by water, and—forgetting quite their quest of Persephone—that they were therefore unable to linger in the sweet precincts of the Pantaleone wines and cooking, devoting weeks to exploring the neighbouring hills, and to unearthing more pulpits and more Jonahs in the nearby churches. In the dusk they lingered by the Fountain of Strange Beasts, in the dusk they wandered afoot down the cork-screwed paths up which they had so furiously and smellily mounted. Berliet hooted contemptuously behind them as he crawled after, jeering as at “scare-cats,” who dared mount, but shrank from descending these abrupt curves and tiptilted inclines except in the safety of their own low-heeled shoes.