CHAPTER XIII.
"If ever you have looked on better days, If ever been where bells have knolled to church; If ever sat at any good man's feast! If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, And know what 'tis to pity, and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be." SHAKESPEARE.
It is now necessary to advance the time, and to transfer the scene of our tale to another, but not a distant, part of the same sea.

Let the reader fancy himself standing at the mouth of a large bay of some sixteen or eighteen miles in diameter, in nearly every direction; though the shores must be indented with advancing promontories and receding curvatures, while the depth of the whole might possibly a little exceed the greatest width.

He will then occupy the spot of which we wish to present to him one of the fairest panoramas of earth.

On his right stands a high, rocky island of dark tufa, rendered gay, amid all its magnificent formations, by smiling vineyards and teeming villages, and interesting by ruins that commemorate events as remote as the Caesars.

A narrow passage of the blue Mediterranean separates this island from a bold cape on the main, whence follows a succession of picturesque, village-clad heights and valleys, relieved by scenery equally bold and soft, and adorned by the monkish habitations called in the language of the country Camaldolis, until we reach a small city which stands on a plain that rises above the water between one and two hundred feet, on a base of tufa, and the houses of which extend to the very verge of the dizzy cliffs that limit its extent on the north.