DO not trouble to tell me: I know I have been delinquent. But then that is not one of my “too many and too-tedious-to-make-mention of feelings.” So the one time can be blinked at. Especially if you remember the scripture injunction. If you are like me you never do unless you want to.

Of course your letter came and I had my habitual “good intentions,” but well, to be honest, I am sure I do not know what became of them. I only realize that the days “shod with silver speech,” and muzzled with golden speechlessness, have slipped away and given no warning, till I should be afraid to try to count them. Let them go, and be magnanimous enough to bear no malice. That comes so easy to me I can recommend it without any tinges of that inward monitor yclept conscience. It would be the 13th labor of Hercules to attempt to fill up this interval. My brain reels at the mere mention. But I will just give you a mosaic of random tiles. You will like it just as well. In any case you would feel called on to groan critically and perhaps cry aloud: “The old flippancy! What a butterfly she is.” You know I do not mind.

One of the party, the “lord of creation,” you may be sure, had the fever at Rome, to his supreme disgust, not the Roman, but typhoid. He was sick two months. This, of course, was a cloud. But he is a darling, and just to get him well again was our supreme anxiety. As soon as he was well enough to travel without risk, he was ordered here to escape Roman lassitude and be “built up.” Last Monday we started, “coming by easy stages.” Naples was our first resting-place. We remained till Saturday. By that date the invalid through much eating and drinking shed even the rÔle of a convalescent, and “Richard is himself again,” was asserted in every look and act. But we have come on here all the same. I wish you could spend just one day if no more with us. Such a dream-place as it is! Words can never picture it to you, but the cousins in chorus, declared I must write and tell you all about it. As if I could! Why you? They did not say. I did not ask. I suppose because they are ready to hear another of your letters read. You see they have not such a funny, audacious correspondent as you on their list.

But to this “castle in Spain,” this “Palace Beautiful,” this “stately pleasure dome,” this “Dream Perch,” this “Hotel Torre di Mezzacapo,” on the “blue Meditterranean’s” loveliest inlet, the Gulf of Salerno. Oh, dear. How to put it into words! It is an ancient castle, built on and out of, and into, a lofty cliff, hanging right over the water. I could cast my lines into its clear depths and angle to no end of capture, if they were long enough. They would have to measure 90 meters (300 feet) though to touch water. Who would help me land my whales? A Cornichean road, the ideal highway of creation, winds past its base to Amalfi. I hope you know Longfellow’s poem of that name. Sheer down the solid rock drops to the wavelets’ foam-tipped caress. I can hear them when I bend over the parapet of my terrace so high above them in the air. From that highway, superb-macadamized, the ascent to our doorway is a tortuous, devious, steep climb. A little donkey-cart does it. Two at a time inside, outside the driver alongside the poor beast and with a desperate clutch of its loose hide to help it to keep its feet, and like poor Joe, “keep moving on.” As I caught sight of that grip, a flash of memory gave back a description read long ago, of an exceedingly high-bred aristocratic, “black and tan terrier—its skin was at least two and one-half sizes too large for it.” Poor little donkey! I can fancy him braying his loudest that dying refrain of the woman,

After he landed the four of us “safe and sound,” he dragged up with equal faithfulness our four “Saratogas.” When I saw that, I cowered into a corner and hid my eyes. How I hated that trunk of mine! I think that particular donkey ought to be canonized and made a “constellation” in one of the unoccupied places of honor in the sky. Up here we see “an inclosed world of beauty.” The vague distance of the sea, where the eye gets lost directly; the long, low promontory or cape, where Paestum lies stranded in blue mist; mountains that lift themselves up so high they win crowns of snow for their temerity; great, soaring, jagged, curiously rent cliffs, many with their sheltered sides fashioned into terraces set in fruitful lemon and orange groves; the indented coast, with many a pretty bay and baylet and little stretches of exquisite beaches; and countless villages in the tenderest tones of white, gray, drab, etc. It is a wonderful scene, and so soporific I could fall asleep this very instant. It is Sunday all the time. The town of Maiori lies far below us on the northeast, with a population of six thousand, an exquisite bit of harbor and lovely beach. I see pretty little craft, of many styles and sizes, run up on the last. Now and then, out on the water, a microscopic sail attached to a little black speck, or a lazily propelled row-boat, breaks up “the death in life” of the scene. They tell me as a fact that can be verified, of other breaks of the following ilk, if one chooses to hang by the hour over the parapet of the different terraces or esplanades: a rattle-trap of a wagon, with a team of three animals abreast, mixed horses and donkeys, or oxen and cows, but each one close kin to my poor “Raffaello” (that is our donkey’s name); a tourist carriage or donkey cart; or a procession of “beasts of burden,” with immense baskets, heaping full, or casks of wine and water, or some miscellaneous burden, borne on top of their heads, and heavy enough to bend them half-double at least—in the shape of women. Oftentimes men walk beside, but never seem to share those burdens.

Maiori lies at the mouth of a gorge, the Val Tramonti. This runs (I don’t know how far) back through a volcanic district. There is an ascending drive that is singularly unique and interesting. On both sides, a jumble of rent mountains; upheavals of beautiful knolls, that would themselves be mountains elsewhere, in the center of vast basins and deep valleys. Capping many of the highest peaks are lone, picturesque, gray old churches, with tall, square towers. The sides of the mountains are laid out in terraces, covered with lemon groves or orchards. Continuous chains of quaint old towns nestle in the depths or perch at different altitudes, so varied in their styles of architecture, combination of colors, and situations framed in such a novel ensemble, one is kept in a glow all the way. All this region abounds with such drives.

Verily, if this modicum of a world is so full of wonders, it is crushing to try to grasp the stupendous creation of which it is so small a fraction.

We shall stay here, exploring, perhaps a fortnight; and then to “fresh fields.”

There is talk of Sicily and Africa, if it continues cool enough.

And to make last week one to “set apart,” my “good brother,” Mr. W——, reached me with one of his letters. There are a sacred few who keep us at our best. The angel—not the demon—in us answers to their summons. Just to be with them seems to banish whatsoever is unworthy. Heaven—the All-good—seems not far away, hedged off from entrance by this and that device of man; but all about us, with its paths ready and free to our treading, and its true life not withdrawing and making conditions of acceptance, but enfolding and making us feel it is our own inheritance and we can enter into it.

I hope the little book is growing or quite grown. It interests me to hear of it. Do not give it up, whatever you do.

I noted the recovery of your peculiar and pretty penmanship the moment I saw your letter. Blessed be the potato, henceforth and forever!

L. G. C.

Maiori, April 5, 1886.