Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands, the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one resource is the coral-fishery. The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it, the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence, in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a given signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress" breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments--the