Page:Wha Katy Did Next - Coolidge (1886).djvu/231

 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