of Italy, and sometimes a considerably higher price is asked than the seller is prepared to take. I had the specimens purchased put in a box, carefully packed, to send from Naples home by sea, and found on entering Naples that _octroi_ duty upon it was exacted, and this not according to value, but to weight. The wood shops are among the best in Sorrento, but I was struck with the marvellous likeness there was, in size at least, in the common small shops of Sorrento to what had been shops in Pompeii. * * * * * We led a quiet life very pleasantly among friends and acquaintances at the hotel in Sorrento for about a fortnight, glad of rest after so much previous sight–seeing; but the hotel was always full, and the constant jingling of horses’ bells, denoting the arrival or departure of carriages, kept it lively, while, among other diversions, we witnessed the Tarantala dancing entertainment, to which I have elsewhere alluded (p. 72). We had at first thought of going to Cava, with a view to taking trips thence to Amalfi and Pæstum; but preferring rest, left that, like many other excursions, to another opportunity, which might never come. We returned to Naples on 11th April, having a glorious day for the return drive to Castellamare. The trees were only budding, so that we did not see things in perfection. As we drove out of the hotel yard, a man, neither clothed in plush and fine linen nor recently washed, jumped up and sat on the luggage behind, an undesirable–looking and unengaged lackey. The driver explained it was to guard the luggage, which sometimes, I believe, is, by the nimble–fingered inhabitants of the bay, quietly abstracted if not well roped. It was only, however, a genteel method of begging for 30 centimes, with which at Castellamare he was well satisfied. The beggars of Sorrento are certainly industrious in their calling. I stayed a few minutes at one place to make a little sketch, and was immediately surrounded by half–a–dozen women, and at least as many children, all wanting copper. One regular beggar, a man, old to appearance, who was constantly sauntering about, stick in hand, amused me much. His address was, as you approached him, arrestively and decisively, ‘Signor!’ You proceeded a yard farther, and it was more decisively, or rather imperatively, ‘Signor!’ You passed him, and it was ‘Signor! Signor!’ (weepingly) ‘povero vecc. he he per amor di Dio,’ a phrase generally employed by the Italian beggars. It is, however, but fair to add, that begging in Italy is not nearly so bad as it once was, for the authorities are setting their face against it. Still, in some places, it is a great annoyance that one cannot walk along the streets of a small town like Sorrento without being assailed by the same everlasting beggar, giving to whom only encourages to ask again. * * * * *