Now there is really but one way to approach Sicily satisfactorily. Of course a boat leaves Naples every evening for Palermo, but the Mediterranean is a treacherous element in February. It had broken night after night in thunderous shocks upon the sea wall, making the heavy stone-built hotel quiver beneath their beds, and in the darkness of each night they had seen the water squadron charge again and again, the foremost spinning up tall and white to fling itself in frenzied futile spray across the black street. So that the thought of trusting insides jaded by two weeks of the Atlantic to such a foe as this was far from their most reckless dreams. The none too solid earth was none too good for such as they, and a motor eats up dull miles by magic. Motors are to be had in Naples even when fair skies lack, and with a big Berliet packed with luggage, and with the concierge’s tender, rueful smile shedding blessings, at last they slid southward. —Pale clouds of almond blossoms were spread against grey terraces.... Less pale smells rose in gusty whiffs.... Narrow yellow streets crooked before them, where they picked a cautious hooting way amid Italy’s rising population complicated with goats and asses.... Then flat, muddy roads, and Berliet bumping, splashing between fields of green artichokes.... 21The clouds held up; thinned, and parted, showing rifts of blue.... Vesuvius pushed the mists from her brow, and purple shadows dappled her shining, dripping flanks.... Orange groves rose along the way. Flocks of brown goats tinkled past. More almond boughs leaned over walls washed a faded rose. Church bells clanked sweetly through the moist air from far-away hills. Runnels chattered out from secret channels fringed with fern. Grey olive orchards hung like clouds along the steep.... The sun was fairly out, and Italy assuming her old traditional air of professional beauty among the nations of the earth.... The Berliet climbed as nimbly as a goat toward Sorrento. The light deepened; the sea began to peacock. More and more the landscape assumed the appearance of the impossibly chromatic back drop of an opera, and as the turn was made under the orange avenue of the hotel at Sorrento everything was ready for the chorus of merry villagers, and for the prima donna to begin plucking song out of her bosom with stereotyped gestures. It was there they began to offer the light wines of the country, as sweetly perfumed and innocent as spring violets; no more like to the astringent red inks masquerading in straw bottles in America under the same names, than they to Hercules. The seekers of Persephone drank deeply—as much as a wine-glass full—and warmed by this sweet ichor of Bacchus they bid defiance to hoodoos and pushed on to Amalfi.