Their hotel was perched directly over the sea. From the balcony of their
sitting-room they looked down a sheer cliff some sixty feet high, into
the water; their bedrooms opened on a garden of roses, with an orange
grove beyond. Not far from them was the great gorge which cuts the
little town of Sorrento almost in two, and whose seaward end makes the
harbor of the place. Katy was never tired of peering down into this
strange and beautiful cleft, whose sides, two hundred feet in depth, are
hung with vines and trailing growths of all sorts, and seem all
a-tremble with the fairy fronds of maiden-hair ferns growing out of
every chink and crevice. She and Amy took walks along the coast toward
Massa, to look off at the lovely island shapes in the bay, and admire
the great clumps of cactus and Spanish bayonet which grew by the
roadside; and they always came back loaded with orange-flowers, which
could be picked as freely as apple-blossoms from New England orchards in
the spring. The oranges themselves at that time of the year were very
sour, but they answered as well for a romantic date, "From an orange
grove," as if they had been the sweetest in the world.
They made two different excursions to Pompeii, which is within easy
distance of Sorrento. They scrambled on donkeys over the hills, and had
glimpses of the far-away Calabrian shore, of the natural arch, and the
temples of Paestum shining in the sun many miles distant. On Katy's
birthday, which fell toward the end of January, Mrs.
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