Sir John Lubbock tells a story—and this story teaches an obvious lesson—of certain red warrior ants, who capture black fellow pismires, and hold them as slaves; an outrage which must certainly shock all true pismitarian ants. The captors become in time so dependent upon their negro servants that, when deprived of their attendants, they are unable to feed or clean themselves, and lie helplessly upon their backs, feebly waving their paws in the air!...

Peripatetica, having but recently suffered the loss of a maiden slave of a dozen years’ standing, had suffered a like moral disintegration, and she violently lost her taste for travel whenever it became necessary to move from one place to another, attempting to deal with her packing by a mere series of helpless paw-wavings, most picturesque to observe, but which for all practical purposes were highly inefficient. So when she and Jane dropped down and down the zigzags to Giardini—each of those famous views self-consciously presenting itself in turn for the last time—the light figure which hurled itself boldly down the steeps by a short cut, springing along the daring descent with the sure-footed confidence of a goat, proved to be not a wing-heeled Mercury conveying an affectionate message from the gods, but merely a boy from the villa fetching Peripatetica’s left-behind nail brush, hot-water bottle, and umbrella....

From Giardini a spacious plain curves all the way to Syracuse. This broken level is built upon a foundation of inky lava cast out from Hephæstos’ forge in Ætna, in whose wrinkled crevices of black and broken stone has been caught and held all the stored richness of the denuded mountains so long ago stripped of trees; and in this plain grain and flowers and trees innumerable find food and footing. Peripatetica, bred in deep-soiled, fertile fields with wide horizons, drew, as they passed into the open vistas, deep breaths of refreshment and joy. The fierce, soaring aridity of Taormina had oppressed her with a restless sense of imprisonment. Her elbows were as passionate lovers of liberty as the Spartans, and she demanded proper space in which to move them. What she called a view was a view, not merely more mountains climbing, blind and obstinate, between the eye and the landscape. Being, too, of a race always worshippers of Demeter—a race which had spent generations in her service, which considered the cultivation of the soil the only possible occupation of a gentleman, and all other businesses the mere wretched astonishing fate of the unfortunate—she rejoiced loudly and fatiguingly over the blessedness of a return to a sweet land of farms.

“I don’t call that Taormina window-box-gardening on tiny stone ledges a thousand feet up in the air farming,” she scoffed.

“If your tongue was a spade what crops you would raise!” sniffed Jane.

“Well, I raise big harvests of diversion in my own spirit,” retorted the unsuppressed chatterer. “Besides, it’s now my turn to talk. You have done a lot of elaborate speechifying about Taormina. I made you a present of the whole jaggèd, attitudinizing old place, and for the moment I mean to flow unchecked! You needn’t listen if you don’t like. I enjoy hearing myself speak, whether anyone pays the smallest attention or not.”

Which was why, while Jane settled down comfortably to a copy of Theocritus, Peripatetica continued to entertain her own soul with spoken and unspoken comments as to a certain restful letting down of tension which resulted from sliding away from the dazzling, lofty Olympianism of Taormina into a region Cyclopean, perhaps, but with a dawning suggestion of coming humanity. For here, in this plain, succeeding those bright presences that were the elementary forces of nature—forces of the earth and sea and sun, of fire and dew, of thunder, wind, and rain, of the shining day, and the night with its changing moon—first came the primitive earth-spirits, rude and rugged, or delicate and vapourous. Creatures not gods—no longer immutable and immortal, but stronger, older, greater than man, who was yet to come. Creatures partaking somewhat of the nature of both gods and men, but subject to transformation into stream and fountain, into tree and flower; very near to the earth, yet swayed by human passions, by human sorrows and joys.

This plain was the home of nymph and oread, of dryad and faun. Here had the Cyclops and the Titans wrought—first of the great race of Armourers and Smiths—under the tutelage of Vulcan, shaping the beams of the heavens, and the ribs of the earth; arming the gods and forging the lightning.

Ulysses, the earliest of impassioned tourists, had had dealings on this very spot with the last of the Cyclops. A degenerate scion of the great old race, as the last of a great race is apt to be, Polyphemus had sunk to the mere keeping of sheep, and according to Ulysses’ own story he got the better of Polyphemus, and related, upon returning home, the triumph of his superior cunning, with the same naïve relish with which the modern Cookie retails his supposed outwitting of the native curio dealer. Very near to the train, as it ran by the sea’s edge, lay the huge fragments of lava which the blinded Cyclop had cast in futile rage after the escaping Greeks. He was a great stone-thrower, was Polyphemus, for further along the coast lay the boulders he had flung at Acis, the beautiful young shepherd. Polyphemus having still an eye in those days, his aim was truer, and the shepherd was killed, but who may baffle true love? The dead boy melted away beneath the stones and was transformed to the bright and racing river Acis (which they crossed just then), and the river, flowing round the stones, runs still across the plain to fling itself into the arms of the sea-nymph Galatea. So the two still meet as of old, and play laughingly together in and out among the huge rocks, which certainly might have been flung there by Ætna in one of her volcanic furies, but which, if one may believe the Greek story, were really the gigantic weapons of a cruel jealousy.

Jane and Peripatetica could put their heads out of the windows and study history and legend at their ease, the train ambling amiably and not too rapidly through the lovely land, where the near return of Persephone was foreshadowed in the delicate rosy clouds of the Judas trees drifting across the black green of dense carobs. It was foretold, too, by the broad yellow mustard fields blooming under the shadow of silver-grey olive orchards; Fields-of-the-Cloth-of-Gold they were, about which Spring was pitching white tents of plum flowers in which to sign royal alliance with Summer. They saw old Sicilian farm-steadings here and there crowning the rising ground on either hand, freaked and lichened with years, and showing among their spiring cypresses the square towers to which the inhabitants had fled for safety in the old days of Levantine piracy. Many of these houses were very old, six or eight hundred years old, it was said. Orange and lemon groves on either side the way still hung heavy with fruit, plainly feeling it a duty laid upon them to look like the trees in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes; like the trees of all the Old Masters’ backgrounds. Invariably being round, close clumps of green set thick with golden balls, quite unlike the orange trees in America, which have never had proper decorative and artistic models set for their copying, and therefore grow carelessly and less beautifully.

As far as the eye could reach the whole land was furred with the tender green of sprouting corn. For this was once Europe’s granary, and the place of Rome’s bread; here Demeter first taught man to sow and reap, and despite Ætna’s fires, despite the destruction and ravaging of a thousand wars, and thousands of years of careless unrestorative use of the soil, corn still grows on this plain, so hard, so perfect, and so nourishing of grain that no Sicilian can afford to eat it, selling his own crop to macaroni manufacturers, and contenting himself with a poorer imported wheat for his dark daily bread.

In these rich meadows, too, replacing the frigid little Evangelical-looking goat of Taormina, browsed fat flocks in snowy silken fleeces, and with long wavy horns. Flocks that were tended by shepherds draped in faded blue or brown hooded cloaks, wearing sheep’s wool bound about their cross-gartered legs, their feet shod with hairy goat-skin shoes. They leaned in contemplative attitudes on long staves—as every right-minded shepherd should—so old a picture, so unchanged from far-off, pastoral days! Just so had they shown themselves to Theocritus, when that sweet young singer of the early time had wandered here among the herdsmen, the fishers, and the delvers in the good brown earth, in the days when the Greeks still lived and ruled here, so long and long ago.

“I wish they would pipe,” said Peripatetica. “It only needs to complete the picture that innocent sweet trilling of the shepherd’s reed that is like the voices of the birds and of the cicalas.”

“Oh, they daren’t do it here in high noon,” remonstrated Jane. “For fear of Pan, you know.” And she turned back the pages of her little book to read aloud the sweetest and perfectest of the Idyls....

Thyrsis. Sweet, meseems, is the whispering sound of yonder pine tree, goatherd, that murmureth by the wells of water; and sweet are thy pipings. After Pan the second prize shalt thou bear away, and if he take the horned goat, the she-goat shalt thou win; but if he choose the she-goat for his meed, the kid falls to thee, and dainty is the flesh of kids ere the age when thou milkest them.

The Goatherd. Sweeter, O shepherd, is thy song than the music of yonder water that is poured from the high face of the rock! Yea, if the Muses take the young ewe for their gift, a stall-fed lamb shalt thou receive for thy meed; but if it please them to take the lamb, thou shalt lead away the ewe for the second prize.

Thyrsis. Wilt thou, goatherd, in the nymphs’ name, wilt thou sit thee down here, among the tamarisks, on this sloping knoll, and pipe while in this place I watch thy flocks?

Goatherd. Nay, shepherd, it may not be; we may not pipe in the noontide. ’Tis Pan we dread, who truly at this hour rests weary from the chase; and bitter of mood is he, the keen wrath sitting ever at his nostrils. But, Thyrsis, for that thou surely wert wont to sing The Affliction of Daphnis, and hast most deeply meditated the pastoral muse, come hither, and beneath yonder elm let us sit down, in face of Priapus and the fountain fairies, where is that resting-place of the shepherds, and where the oak trees are. Ah! if thou wilt but sing as on that day thou sangest in thy match with Chromis out of Libya, I will let thee milk, ay, three times, a goat that is the mother of twins, and even when she has suckled her kids her milk doth fill two pails. A deep bowl of ivy-wood, too, I will give thee, rubbed with sweet bees’-wax, a two-eared bowl newly wrought, smacking still of the knife of the graver. Round its upper edges goes the ivy winding, ivy besprent with golden flowers; and about it is a tendril twisted that joys in its saffron fruit. Within is designed a maiden, as fair a thing as the gods could fashion, arrayed in a sweeping robe, and a snood on her head. Beside her two youths with fair love-locks are contending from either side, with alternate speech, but her heart thereby is all untouched. And now on one she glances, smiling, and anon she lightly flings the other a thought, while by reason of the long vigils of love their eyes are heavy, but their labour is all in vain.

Beyond these an ancient fisherman and a rock are fashioned, a rugged rock, whereon with might and main the old man drags a great net for his cast, as one that labours stoutly. Thou wouldst say that he is fishing with all the might of his limbs, so big the sinews swell all about his neck, grey-haired though he be, but his strength is as the strength of youth. Now divided but a little space from the sea-worn old man is a vineyard laden well with fire-red clusters, and on the rough wall a little lad watches the vineyard, sitting there. Round him two she-foxes are skulking, and one goes along the vine-rows to devour the ripe grapes, and the other brings all her cunning to bear against the scrip, and vows she will never leave the lad, till she strand him bare and breakfastless. But the boy is plaiting a pretty locust-cage with stalks of asphodel, and fitting it with reeds, and less care of his scrip has he, and of the vines, than delight in his plaiting.

All about the cup is spread the soft acanthus, a miracle of varied work, a thing for thee to marvel on. For this bowl I paid to a Calydonian ferryman a goat and a great white cream cheese. Never has its lip touched mine, but it still lies maiden for me. Gladly with this cup would I gain thee to my desire, if thou, my friend, wilt sing me that delightful song. Nay, I grudge it thee not at all. Begin, my friend, for be sure thou canst in no wise carry thy song with thee to Hades, that puts all things out of mind!

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song! Thyrsis of Ætna am I, and this is the voice of Thyrsis. Where, ah! where were ye when Daphnis was languishing; ye Nymphs, where were ye? By Peneus’ beautiful dells, or by dells of Pindus? for surely ye dwelt not by the great stream of the river Anapus, nor on the watch-tower of Ætna, nor by the sacred water of Acis.

For him the jackals, for him the wolves did cry; for him did even the lion out of the forest lament. Kine and bulls by his feet right many, and heifers plenty, with the young calves bewailed him.

Came Hermes first from the hill, and said, “Daphnis, who is it that torments thee; child, whom dost thou love with so great desire?” The neatherds came, and the shepherds; the goatherds came; all they asked what ailed him. Came also Priapus,—

And said: “Unhappy Daphnis, wherefore dost thou languish, while for thee the maiden by all the fountains, through all the glades is fleeting, in search of thee? Ah! thou art too laggard a lover, and thou nothing availest! A neatherd wert thou named, and now thou art like the goatherd.”

“For the goatherd, when he marks the young goats at their pastime, looks on with yearning eyes, and fain would be even as they; and thou, when thou beholdest the laughter of maidens, dost gaze with yearning eyes, for that thou dost not join their dances.”

Yet these the herdsman answered not again, but he bare his bitter love to the end, yea, to the fated end he bare it.

Ay, but she too came, the sweetly smiling Cypris, craftily smiling she came, yet keeping her heavy anger; and she spake, saying: “Daphnis, methinks thou didst boast that thou wouldst throw Love a fall, nay, is it not thyself that hast been thrown by grievous Love?”

But to her Daphnis answered again: “Implacable Cypris, Cypris terrible, Cypris of mortals detested, already dost thou deem that my latest sun has set; nay, Daphnis even in Hades shall prove great sorrow to Love.

“Get thee to Ida, get thee to Anchises! There are oak trees—here only galingale blows, here sweetly hum the bees about the hives!

“Thine Adonis, too, is in his bloom, for he heards the sheep and slays the hares, and he chases all the wild beasts. Nay, go and confront Diomedes again, and say, ‘The herdsman Daphnis I conquered, do thou join battle with me.’”

“Ye wolves, ye jackals, and ye bears in the mountain caves, farewell! The herdsman Daphnis ye never shall see again, no more in the dells, no more in the groves, no more in the woodlands. Farewell Arethusa, ye rivers good-night, that pour down Thymbris your beautiful waters.

“That Daphnis am I who here do herd the kine, Daphnis who water here the bulls and calves.

“O Pan, Pan! whether thou art on the high hills of Lycæus, or rangest mighty Mænalus, haste hither to the Sicilian isle! Leave the tomb of Helice, leave that high cairn of the son of Lycæon, which seems wondrous fair, even in the eyes of the blessed.

“Come hither, my prince, and take this fair pipe, honey-breathed with wax-stopped joints; and well it fits thy lip; for verily I, even I, by Love am now haled to Hades.

“Now violets bear, ye brambles, ye thorns bear violets and let fair narcissus bloom on the boughs of juniper! Let all things with all be confounded—from pines let men gather pears, for Daphnis is dying! Let the stag drag down the hounds, let owls from the hills contend in song with the nightingales.”

So Daphnis spake, and ended; but fain would Aphrodite have given him back to life. Nay, spun was all the thread that the Fates assigned, and Daphnis went down the stream. The whirling wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the nymphs.

And thou, give me the bowl, and the she-goat, that I may milk her and pour forth a libation to the Muses. Farewell, oh, farewells manifold, ye Muses, and I, some future day, will sing you yet a sweeter song.

The Goatherd. Filled may thy fair mouth be with honey, Thyrsis, and filled with the honeycomb; and the sweet dried fig mayest thou eat of Ægilus, for thou vanquishest the cicala in song! Lo, here is thy cup, see, my friend, of how pleasant a savour! Thou wilt think it has been dipped in the well-spring of the Hours. Hither, hither, Cissætha: do thou milk her, Thyrsis. And you young she-goats, wanton not so wildly lest you bring up the he-goat against you.

“What a crowded place Sicily is!” cried Jane, heaving an oppressed breath.

“Isn’t it?” sympathized Peripatetica. “Here we are on our way to the very fountain, as it seems, of history—Syracuse, where nearly everything happened that ever did happen, and yet one has to mentally push one’s way through a swarming crowd of events to get there, because almost everything that didn’t happen in Syracuse occurred in these Sicilian plains. When you think of the layer on layer of human life, like geologic strata, that lies all over this place, you realize that it would take half a lifetime to come to some understanding of the significance of it all, and that it’s foolish to go on until one can get some hold upon the meaning of what lies right here.”

This “simple but first-class conversation” took place in the eating-station at Catania which the two had all to themselves, most of the Tedeschi tourists frugally remaining in the train and staying their pangs from bottles, and with odds and ends out of paper parcels, from which feasts they emerged later replete but crumby.

Poor Catania! sunk to a mere feeding-trough for passing tourists. She, the great city sitting blandly among her temples and towers, wooed for her money bags by all the warlike neighbours. For whenever her neighbours squabbled with one another, which was pretty nearly all the time—or whenever an outsider intervened—each strove to engage the aid of this rich landholder, sending embassies and emissaries to bully or cajole Catania. As rich folk will, she always tried to protect herself by taking neither side completely, speaking fair to each, and, like all Laodiceans, she made thereby two enemies instead of one, and was considered fair prey by both.

That splendid, dangerous dandy, Alcibiades, was one of these ambassadors. Almost under the feet of Jane and Peripatetica, as they sat with their mouths full of crisp delectable little tarts, had the wily Athenian spoken in the Catanian theatre. The older men enjoyed his eloquent, graceful Greek, but they were quite determined not to be persuaded by it to let his fleet enter their harbour, his army enter their city, or to be used as a base from which to strike the Syracusians. The Catanians didn’t like Syracuse, but they didn’t mean to embroil themselves with her. They secretly hoped the Athenians would reduce that dangerous neighbour to despair, but if either destroyed the other—why, then it would be well to be able to show the victor their clean hands.

Alcibiades was quite aware he was not convincing them, but he enjoyed turning brilliant periods in public, and was meanwhile pleasantly conscious of the young men in the audience admiring the chasing of his buckles, the artful folds of his gold-embroidered chalmyde, the exquisite angle at which he knotted his fillet, privately resolving to readjust their own provincial toilets by the model of this famous glass of fashion. And when they all poured out of the theatre after his brilliantly preferred request had been politely refused, he could afford to smile calmly, for, behold! there was the Athenian fleet in the harbour, the Athenian army in the city. He had not been using those well-turned phrases for mere idleness. They had availed to keep the authorities occupied while his subordinates had executed his commands.

And their caution was of no avail whatever, for in due time, when Alcibiades was in exile and the Athenians rotting in the Latomiæ, Syracuse duly turned and “took it out of” Catania. Took it out good and hard too.

There was no use stopping over a train to see the old theatre and realize for themselves this curious bit of history; it only meant crawling through black passages by the light of a smoky candle, for Ætna in 1669—in a fit of ennui with poor Catania—had pitched down thousands of tons of lava upon her and hid all the rich city’s ancient glories from the sun.

It was from Catania that another interesting Greek had set out upon his last journey. A journey to the crest of that volcano which has been constantly taking a hand in the destinies of Sicily, with what—in its careless malice, its malignant furies—seems almost like the personal wickedness of some demon; that incalculable mountain whose soaring outlines had been coming out at Jane and Peripatetica all day whenever the train turned a corner, as if to reassure them that they couldn’t lose her if they tried. Ætna was from the very beginning the pre-eminent fact in this part of Sicily.

First Zeus—who always had a cheerful disregard of any rules of chivalry in dealing with his enemies—tied down the unlucky Titan Enceladus upon this very spot, and, gathering up enough of Sicily to make a mountain the size of Ætna, heaped it on top of him, probably congratulating himself the while that he had put a complete end to that particular annoyance. But quite a number of rulers since Zeus have discovered that in a rebellious temperament there reside resources of annoyingness which even a god cannot entirely foresee or provide against, and the Titan still heaves restlessly at his load from time to time, rocking the whole island with his struggles, toppling towers, engulfing cities, tearing the earth apart in his furies.

Some of the myths accuse Demeter herself of having set Ætna alight in her frenzy, that all Sicily might thus be illumined to aid her in the search for Persephone, and that never since that reckless day has she been able to extinguish it, but must fight, with rain and dews and snows to save her people’s bread from the flames forever threatening to destroy it. The fire pours forth from time to time, spreading cruel ruin, but ever, aided by her, man creeps up and up once more. Up to Randazzo; up to Brontë, the “thunder town,” given to Lord Nelson by Marie Antoinette’s sister, then Queen of the Two Sicilies, where the Dukes of Brontë, Nelson’s descendants, still live part of each year in their wild eyrie.

The vine and the olive climb and climb after each catastrophe. They cover the old scars of the eruptions, perch in crevices where a goat can scarce stand, and wring from the rich crumbs of soil “wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil that causeth his countenance to shine.”

Up to the top of this Ætna—ten thousand feet up—on the last journey from Catania climbed Empedocles, that strange figure who passes with ringing brazen sandals through the history of Sicily. Empedocles, clothed in purple, crowned with a wreath of golden leaves, followed by thousands to whom he taught some strange, half Pythagorean worship, the form and meaning of which have vanished with time, save for some hints of a sort of mental healing practised upon his followers. Empedocles, composing vast poems of thousands of lines, and vaunting himself as a Super-man, saying:

“An immortal god, and no longer a mortal man, I wander among you; honoured by all, adorned with priestly diadems and blooming wreaths. Into whatever illustrious towns I enter men and women pay me reverence, and I am accompanied by thousands who thirst for their advantage; some being desirous to know the future, and others, tormented by long and terrible disease, waiting to hear the spells that soothe suffering.”

Whether his following fell away; whether he became the victim of some wild melancholy, some corroding welt-schmerz—unable to cure the ills of his own soul with his own doctrines—no one knows, but the dramatic manner of his exit printed his name indelibly upon the memory of the world from which he fled.

Deserting late at night a feast in Catania, he mounted a mule, climbed the rough steeps, threaded the dusky oak woods, dismissed his last follower, and—after lingering a moment to listen to the boy-harper Callicles singing in the dawn at the edge of the forest—he passed on upward through the snows, and was seen no more by human eye. Only the brazen sandal was found beside the crater, into whose unutterable furnace—urged by some divine despair—he had flung himself: all that had been that aspiring, passionate life vanishing in an instant in a hiss of steam, a puff of gas, upon the most stupendous funeral pyre ever chosen by man.

There was endless history waiting to be looked into at Catania; frightful passagings and scufflings, massacres and exilings, murders, conspiracies and poisonings, and every other uncomfortable exhibition of “man’s inhumanity to man”—accompanied, of course, by heroisms, patriotic self-sacrifice, and a thousand humble, unremembered kindnesses and virtues, such as forever form warp and woof of the web of life and time. But railway schedules, even in Sicily, are almost heartlessly indifferent to tradition, and when the last tartlet was consumed the two seekers for Persephone were dragged Syracuse-ward, along with the crumby Tedeschi, divided during the long afternoon between increasing drowsiness and reproachful Baedekers. At last came sea marshes, where salt-pans evaporated in the sun, and toward sunset the train dumped them all promiscuously into station omnibuses at the capital of history; too grubby and fatigued to care whether the first class in historical research was called or not.

The Tedeschi, after their frugal fashion, went in search of cheap pensions in the city, and only Jane and Peripatetica entered the wheeled tender of the Villa Politi, along with a young Italian pair, obviously engaged upon a honeymoon. A pair who never ceased to look unutterable things at each other out of fine eyes bistred with railway grime, nor ceased to murmur soft nothings from lips surrounded with the shadows of railway soot, undaunted by the frank interest of the hotel portier hanging on to the step, nor by the joltings of the dusty white road that led, through the noisy building of many ugly new villas, up to bare, wind-swept heights.

Strong in the possession of a note from the proprietor promising accommodation, with which, this time, the wayfarers had had the prudence to arm themselves, Jane and Peripatetica swept languidly up the steps, ordering that their luggage be placed in their rooms and tea served immediately upon the terrace.

But there were no rooms. No rooms of any kind, single or double!

The note was produced. There it was, down in black and white!

The young Signor Antonio drew a similar weapon—more black and white promises!

The Padrone raised eyes and hands in a gesture almost consoling in its histrionic effectiveness.

Could he make guests depart at the time they said they would depart?

Could he cast them out neck and crop when they found Syracuse so attractive that they changed their minds about going away and vacating rooms promised to others?

He left it to Jane. He left it to Peripatetica. He left it to Signor Antonio. He left it to Signor Antonio’s beautiful bride, his “bellissima sposa.” Could he? He asked that!...

The two seekers were sternly sarcastic. Signor Antonio imitated the histrionic attitude. The Bellissima Sposa simply smiled fatuously. Beloved Antonio now held her destinies in his strong hand. Was it a royal suite? Well and good. Was it a corner of a stone wall under an umbrella? It was still well and good, for would she not still be with her Antonio?

The honeyed submissiveness of this was too much for even the wicked obduracy of the Padrone.

There was a billiard room—for the night. To-morrow some one must keep his promise and go. They could choose among themselves.

The bride was led away to the billiard room, still gazing upon her Antonio with intoxicated content, and two cross females, shaking the dust of the Villa Politi’s glowing garden and vine-wreathed terraces from their feet, jolted back again indignantly along the bare, windy heights fretted by the clamour of a sirocco-tortured sea. Past the gritty precincts of the ugly building villas, to the gaunt precincts of an hotel within the shrunken town. There to climb early into beds of the sloping pitch and rugged surface of a couple of tiled roofs; to lay their heads upon pillows undoubtedly stuffed with the obdurate skulls of all Syracuse’s myriad dead, and to listen in the wakefulness thereby induced to the dull sickening thuds about the floor which they knew, for good and sufficient reasons, to be the nocturnal hopping of the mighty Syracusan flea....

“Fancy anyone being tempted to remain over here!” sneered Peripatetica.

This was in the morning. They had compared the bleatings of the goats; the raucous early cries of the population; the effects of sirocco; the devices by which, clinging with teeth and nails, they had succeeded in maintaining their perch on the tile roofs; had boasted of their shikarry among the hopping, devouring monsters of the dark.

“Talk of history!” mourned Jane. “Who could be the adequate Herodotus of last night?”

They were on their way to the Temple of Minerva. The route led by a wide sea-street, half of whose length gave upon that famous Inner Harbour so often filled with hostile fleets, so often barred by great chains, so often echoing with clanging battles, with the bubbling shrieks of the drowning. Now the sparkling waters rolled untinged with blood, the clean salt air swept unhindered across their path, for half of the huge sea-wall had been recently demolished to let in wind and sun, though part still towered grimly, darkening the way, shutting out the light from the opposite dwellings.

The path turned at right angles and wound through narrow foot-pathless cracks, between houses; cracks that served the older Syracuse in lieu of streets, where swarmed in the dingy narrownesses the everlasting goat, the ever pervasive child. Very different children these from those cherub heads, with busy little legs growing out of them, who formed the rising population of Taormina. Taormina, who has solved that whole question of educating children; a question which still so puzzles the unintelligent rest of mankind. For weeks they had walked the ancient ways of that high-perched town, picking careful steps amid its infant hordes, and never once had they heard a cry, or seen a discontented child.

“Occupation was the secret of all that cherubic goodness, I think,” said Peripatetica reflectively. “Don’t you remember that every single one of them had a job?”

“Of course, I remember,” said Jane crossly. “You needn’t remind me. It was only twenty-four hours ago we were there—though it seems ages since we fell out of the tender protecting care of dear ‘Questo-qui.’ You can put it all in the book if you feel you must talk about it.”

“Jane, your usually charming temper has been spoiled by a night on a roof. It has made a cat of you,” persisted Peripatetica as she calmly circled round a goat. When the fount of her eloquence was unsealed it was not to be choked by the mere casting of a stony snub into it.

“I devoted some of the dark hours on my tiles to profound philosophic reflection upon the Taorminian methods with children,” she continued. “I have often thought the ennui suffered by children and pet animals was the cause of much of their restless fretfulness. Even the most undeveloped nature feels the difference between a real occupation and an imitation one; feels the importance of being an economic factor. Now those Taormina children from the age of two years are made to feel they are really important and necessary members of the family. They knit as soon as they can walk; they sew, they do drawn-work, at five. They sit in the streets at little tables and help cobble shoes or mend teakettles. They shop for busy parents; they fetch and carry. They pull out of the gardens and orchards weeds as tall as themselves, and everywhere are calm and self-respecting, and receive from their parents and their grown-up neighbours that serious courtesy and consideration due to useful and well-behaved citizens. One does not slap or jerk or scold valuable and important members of the community, and no youthful Taorminian would permit such an unjustifiable liberty from a parent.”

Borne on this flood of words they suddenly flowed out into a big irregular square where stood one of the most curious buildings in the world; the great temple of Pallas of the Syracusans. The enormous fluted Doric columns were sunk into the walls of a Cathedral, for Zosimus, bishop of Syracuse in the Seventh Century, had seized the columned frame and had plastered his church upon it—but so great was the diameter of the pillars that their sides and capitals protruded through the walls inside and out like the prodigious stone ribs of some huge skeleton. The Saracens had come later, and, after slaughtering the priests and women who clung shrieking to the altars, had added battlements to the roof, and the Eighteenth Century, being unable, of course, to keep its finger out of even the most reverend pie, had gummed upon the portal a flaring baroque façade of yellow stone. But through all disfigurements and defacements the temple still showed its soaring majesty, and Peripatetica, at sight of it, cried:

“One dead in the fields!”...

For suddenly was revealed to the two the meaning of what they had been journeying to see—it was the dead body of a great civilization.

Here, nearly three thousand years since, had come Archias, the rich Heraclid of Corinth. He had gathered sullenly into little ships his wealth, his family, and his servants, and had fled far down the horizon, an execrated fugitive because of the slaying of beautiful Actæon. And, finding on the coast of the distant God’s-land a reproduction of the bays and straits of the Corinth which had cast him out, he founded there a city. A city that was to have a life like the life of some gifted, powerful man, growing from timid infancy to a lusty youth full of dreams and passions and vague towering ambitions; struggling with and conquering his fellows; grasping at power and glory, heaping up riches unbelievable, decking himself in purple and gold, living long and gloriously and tumultuously; and who was to know rise and fall, defeats and triumphs, and finally was to die on the battlefield, and be left there by the victor to rot. So that all the flesh would drop from the long frame, the muscles dry and fall apart, the eyes be sightless, and the brain dark; and the little busy insects of the earth would carry away the fragments bit by bit, and on the field where he lay would be found at last only the hollow skull once so full of proud purpose; only the slack white bones of the arm that had wielded the strong sword, the vast arch of the gaunt ribs that once had sheltered the brave heart of Syracuse. And among these dry bones little curious creatures would come to peep and peer and build their homes; spiders spinning webs over the empty eye sockets, mice weaving their nests among the wide-flung knuckles....

One little spider, about ten minutes old, lay in wait for these two tourist flies at the side door of the Cathedral with an offer to guide them, and though they sternly endeavoured to brush the insect aside, doubting his infantile capacity to direct their older intelligences, the Spider was not of the to-be-brushed-aside variety and knew better than they what they really needed. While they wandered through the vulgar uglinesses of Zosimus’ shrine, trying to recall Cicero’s glowing picture of the temple in its glory, he never took his claws off of them. While they talked of the great doors inlaid with gold and ivory, of the brazen spears, of the cella walls frescoed with the portraits and the battles of the Sikel Kings, of the pedestals between each column bearing images of the gods in ivory, silver, and bronze, the Spider was patient and merely murmured “Greco” or “molto antico” by way of encouraging chorus. He let them babble unchecked of the tall image of armed Pallas standing behind the altar, with plumed helmet and robe of Tyrian purple, grasping her great spear in her right hand and resting the left hand upon the golden shield that bore a sculptured Medusa head. Upon her pedestal was carved the cock, the dragon, and the serpent, and the altar before her was heaped with fresh olive boughs about the smouldering spices sending up wavering clouds of scented smoke that coiled among the ceiling’s gilded plates. Without, upon the roof, stood another great shield of gilded bronze, a beacon for sailors who, setting out upon long voyages, carried a cup of burning ashes from her altar to sprinkle on the waves as the glittering landmark faded down the sky.

But when these reminiscences of the “molto antico” finally exhausted themselves, the Spider rose to his occasion. He was vague about Minerva, but Santa Lucia was his trump card. He was eminently capable of guiding any number of travellers to the chapel of that big swarthy idol adorned with wire-and-cotton wreaths, and hung about with votive silver hands and hearts, arms and legs, in grateful testimony of the limbs and organs cured by her mercy and power. He could pour out in burning Sicilian, illustrated by superb spidery gestures, a thrilling description of the yearly villegiatura of Syracuse’s patron saint. How twice in a twelvemonth she feels the need of change of air, and all the town attends her visit of a few days to the church beyond the bridge, she being escorted by priests and censors, and blaring bands, and wearing her finest jewels and toilet, as befits a lady on ceremonial travels. It is a festa for all Syracuse, Spider explains, with much good eating and “molto buono vino.”

Jane, always a molten mass of useful information, interjects sotto voce into the flood of his narrative that precisely the same ceremony was used for the image of Diana when she was the patron goddess of the Syracusans, and the very same molto buono vino so overcame the populace at one of Diana’s festas that Marcellus, the Roman, after a siege of three years, captured the long and fiercely defended city that very night.

The Spider took them later to see the handful of fragments alone remaining of Diana’s fane—broken columns sunk in a fosse between two houses—though once a temple as splendid as Minerva’s. A temple served by many priestesses, and surrounded by a great grove sloping down to the fountain of Arethusa. Among these trees the Oceanides herded the sacrificial deer, and troops of just such silken-coated, wavy-horned goats as feed to-day upon the Catanian plain. And to this grove came young girls, offering up, to please the great Huntress, their abandoned childish toys of baked clay. For oddly enough the wild, arrowy goddess who loved to shed the blood of beasts, adored children, and was a special patron of theirs, and would even listen favourably to the petitions of barren wives.

There seemed some strange vagueness, some shadowy inexplicableness in the worship of Diana. All the other gods typified some force of nature, some resultant struggle and passion of man caught in nature’s web, but of the moon they knew only that it influenced tides and the growing of plants. What is one to make then of this fierce ivory-skinned Maid who sweeps, crescent-crowned, through the moonlit glades of the deep primitive forests, with bayings of lean questing hounds and echoing call of silver horns, hard on the track of crashing boar, of leaping deer? There is something as glimmeringly elusive, as magically haunting in the personality and the worship of Diana as in the moon itself.

They offered the web of this conundrum to the Spider, but he wisely refused to allow himself to be entangled in it. This, however, is anticipating the real course of events.

Already, before leaving the Cathedral, another conundrum had been asked and not answered.

High on opposite sides of the walls of the nave Jane and Peripatetica had observed two ornate glass and gilt coffins. The one on the left contained the half-mummy, half-skeleton of a man. A young, beardless face it was, the still fair skin drawn tight over the features; the still blond hair clustering about it in curls of dusty gold. The fleshless visage was handsome, and though strange and ghostly, not repulsive. The skeleton body was clothed in velvet and gold, and the bony, gloved fingers clasped a splendid silver-scabbarded sword; an empty dagger case was hanging from an embroidered baldrick across the dead man’s breast. He lay on his side in an uneasy attitude, looking through the transparent pane of his last home toward the opposite crystal sarcophagus. This opposite coffin contained a half-mummied, half-skeleton woman—a woman also young and fair-haired; artfully coiffed, her tresses wrapped with pearls. Neither was her face repulsive; some strange process had preserved a dry whiteness in the skin stretched smooth and unwrinkled upon the bones and integuments, though all the flesh was gone. She too was clothed in gold and silk in a fashion centuries old. Through the lace of the sleeves showed the white polished bones of what must once have been warm rounded arms. She too was gloved; she too crouched upon her side uneasily, but she did not face her companion. Her head was thrown back as if in pain; and plunged through the pointed silk corselet—just where there must once have beat a young heart—was the gold-handled dagger from the empty dagger case hung to the embroidered baldrick.

Who were they?

What tragedy was this? why did they lie here in their crystal sepulchres—was it the record of some strange crime, preserved with meticulous care for all the world to see?

The Spider could not tell. They had always been there. He did not know their names or their story. He could not refer to anyone who did. Baedeker was equally indifferent and uncommunicative; he made no mention of them. Hare was silent. Sladen ignored them. No questioning of guide-books or guides ever unravelled that mystery.

From the temple of Diana the Spider led Jane and Peripatetica through more narrow, crooked streets thronged with rough, fierce Syracusan children, to see the Sixteenth Century palace of the Montaltos, now fallen on grimy days. The windows with their ogives and delicate twisted columns were crumbling, and the noble court—through which silken guests and mailed retainers had passed to mount the great stairs and throng the long balconies—was now full of squalid, squalling populace, and flocks of evil-savoured brown goats being milked for the evening meal.

For some unexplained reason the mere presence of the Spider was an offence to the lowering boys who laired in this court. His grown-up air of being capably in charge of two female forestieri stank in their resentful nostrils, but Spider was an insect of his hands, landing those hands resoundingly upon the cheeks of his buffeters and hustlers until an enraged mother took the part of one of her discomfited offspring, and under her fierce cuffings the Spider melted into outraged tears.

Peripatetica had already discovered that angry English had a demoralizing effect upon the natives. Its crisp consonants seemed as daunting as blows to the vowelled Sicilian; armed with which, and a parasol, the Spider was rescued and borne half way to the fountain of Arethusa before he could control his sniffles and his protesting fingers, upon which he offered passionate illustration that even Hercules could not overcome the odds of ten to one, and that tears under the circumstances left no smirch upon nascent manhood.

Jane, with her usual large grasp of financial questions, applied a lire to the wounded heart with the happiest results, and it was a once more united and cheerful trio which leaned over Arethusa’s inadequate little fount with its green scum and its frowzy papyrus plants. Poor Nymph! She of the rainbow, and the “couch of snows”—she whose “footsteps were paved with green.” Flying from the gross wooing of Alpheus she comes all the way from Elis under the sea to take refuge with moon-crowned Artemis—Artemis “the protectress”—and for safety is turned into a sparkling pool which feeds all Syracuse with its sweet waters. Now Artemis is dead. Her cool groves have given way to acres of arid stone convents; earthquakes have cracked Arethusa’s basin, letting the sea in and the sweet water out; modern bad taste has walled her vulgarly about, and the poor old nymph can only gurgle reiterantly, “I was once a beauty; long ago, long ago!” with not the smallest hope that any tourist will believe it.

The Spider has retired to his web. Pranzo has been discussed, and Jane and Peripatetica, refreshed, are taking another nibble at the vast mouthful of Syracuse’s past.

It was a thrilling pranzo. Not because of the food, nor of its partakers. The food was the same old stereotyped menu. Gnocchi with cheese. Vegetables, divorced from the meats—they cannot apparently occupy the same course in any part of Italy. More cheese—a jardinière of pomegranates, oranges, dates, and almonds. Wine under a new name, but with the same delicate perfumed savour of all the other wines they have drunk.

No more did the guests offer any startling variety. The same tall condescending English woman; elderly, manacled with bracelets, clanking with chains; domineering a plain, red cheek-boned, flat-chested daughter obviously needing a lot of marrying off on Mamma’s part; dominating also a nervous, impetuous husband—the travelling Englishman being much given to nervous impetuosity. A few fat, greasy Italians with napkin corners planted deeply into their collars, and scintillating the gross joys of gluttony. Two dark-faced melancholy-eyed foreigners, not easily placed as to nationality. All types of feminine Americans. If it were possible to see only their eyes they would be recognizable as Americans from their glance of bold, alert self-confidence and cheerfulness, very noticeable by contrast with the European eye. Also if one could see only that inevitable ready-made silk bodice the wearers would be recognizable as fellow countrywomen. The man who manufactures that type of bodice at home must be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

No; the thrill of the pranzo was due to invisible causes.

Behind the door from which the hopelessly estranged meat and vegetables emerged there arose a clash and murmur as of some domestic storm, and the waiters passed the spinach course with an air so tense and distrait that the crunching horde felt their forks strain with curiosity in their hands. Even the fat Italians paused in their gorging to stare. Even the foreigners’ melancholy dark eyes grew interested.

After the spinach course ensued a long interval; the waiters lingering about with empty platters and furtive pretences of occupation, plainly not daring to enter that door, behind which ever waxed the loud rumour of domestic war.

The interval increased in length. The clamour rose and rose, and someone went in search of the Padrone.

Ours was a splendid Padrone; clothed upon with a redingote and an historic and romantic dignity. For had not Guy de Maupassant mentioned him with respectful affection in “La Vie Errante”? The memory of which artistic appreciation still surrounded him with an aura. The Padrone entered that fateful door with calm, stern purpose, while the guests crumbled their bread in patient hope.

The domestic storm drew breath for one terrible moment, then suddenly rose to the fury of a cyclone, and the Padrone was shot convulsively forth into our midst, the romantic aura hanging in tragic tatters about him. Holding to the wall he swallowed hard several times, seeking composure, then passed, with knees wabbling nervously beneath the stately redingote, to the office, where could be witnessed his passionately protesting gestures and whispers poured into the sympathetic bosom of the concierge.

The cyclone had expended itself; the courses resumed their course, but what had taken place behind that closed door was never known. It remained another Syracusan mystery.

The Museo at Syracuse, though small, is the best in Europe, for here, as on an open page, is written the whole history of the island of Sicily—not a gap or a break in the story of more than three thousand years; of perhaps five thousand years, for it antedates all the certain dates of history. Here are cases full of the stone and obsidian tools and weapons of the autochthonous Sikels; their crude pottery, their rough burial urns, their bone ornaments, and feathery wisps of their woven stuffs. These are all curiously like the relics of the Mound-builders of America, now in the Smithsonian Institution. Apparently the Stone Age was as deadeningly similar everywhere as is our own Age of Steel.

Follows the rude metal working of the Siculians, who, having some knowledge of the use of iron, can build boats, and come across the narrow strait at Messina and drive out the Sikels. So long ago as that the old process of “assimilation” begins. The Siculians begin to work in colour, to ornament their pottery, to dye their stuffs, to mark their silver and iron with rough chisel patterns—patterns and colours again astonishingly like those of our own Pueblo Indians.

There are fragments of Phœnician work here and there—the traders from Tyre and Sidon are beginning to cruise along the coast and barter their superior wares with the inhabitants.

All at once the arts make a great spring upward. The Greeks have appeared. Rude, archaic, Dorian, these arts at first, but strong, and showing a new spirit. The potteries have a glaze, the patterns grow more intricate, the reliefs show a plastic striving for grace and life, the ornaments are of gold as well as silver and bronze, and steel has appeared. Follows a splendid flowering; an apogee of beauty is reached. Vases of exquisite contours covered with spirited paintings, pictures of life and death, of war and love. Coins that are unrivaled in numismatic beauty; struck frequently with the quadriga to celebrate the winning of the chariot race at the Olympic games; a triumph valued as greatly by the Greeks of Sicily as is the winning of the Derby by English horsemen. Tools, jewels, arms, all adorned with infinite taste and skill. Statues of such subtle grace and loveliness as this famous “Nymph,” the long-buried marble now grown to tints of blond pearl. Figurines of baked clay, reproducing the costumes, the ornaments, the physiology of the passing generations—faces arch, lovely, full of gay humour. Splendid sarcophagi, and burial urns still holding ashes and calcined bones, and tiny clay reproductions of the death masks of the departed, full of tender human individuality, or else heads of the gods, such as that enchanting tinted and crowned Artemis, that still lies in one of the great sarcophagi amid a handful of burned bones.

Punic and Roman remains begin to show themselves, recording that tremendous struggle between Europe and Africa for dominion in the midland sea, under the impact of which the Greek civilization is to be crushed. Byzantine ornament appears. Africa makes another struggle and is for a while triumphant, leaving record of the Moorish domination in damascened arms, in deep-tinted tiles.

The Goths and Normans fuse with the Saracen arts at first, but soon dominate the Eastern influence and shake it off, developing an art inferior only to the Greek. The Spanish follow, baroque, sumptuous, pseudo-classical. All the story of all the conquerors is here.

“Oh!” sighs Peripatetica. “What an illustrated history; I could go on turning its pages for days.”

“Well, you’ll turn them alone!” snapped Jane, clutching frantically at her side, and adding in a dreadful whisper: “There are fleas hopping all over these historical pages. Come away this instant.”

But they linger a moment on the way out to look again at the famous headless Venus Landolina.

“There is only one real Venus,” commented Peripatetica contemptuously. “The Melian. All the rest are only plump ladies about to step into their baths. I detest these fat women with insufficient clothing who sprawl all over Europe calling themselves the goddesses of love. Goddesses indeed! They look more like soft white chestnut worms. That great dominating, irresistible lady of the Louvre is a deity, if you like—Our Lady of Beauty—besides, this little person’s calf is flat on the inner side.”

“Iss it not righd dat her calve should be vlat on de inside?” queried an elderly Swiss, also looking, and showing all her handsome porcelain teeth in a smile of anxious uncertainty. “I dink dat must be righd, because Baedeker marks her wid a ztar.”

“Don’t allow your opinions to be unsettled by this lady’s,” consoled Jane sweetly. “She isn’t really an authority. It would be wiser perhaps and more comfortable to be guided by Baedeker.”

“Bud she has no head,” grieved the Swiss. “How can Baedeker mark her wid a ztar w’en she has no head?”

How indeed? But then, there is such a lot of body!...

It is some days later. They have “done” the river Amapus; have been rowed among the towering feathery papyrus plants, the original roots of which were sent to Heiro I. by Ptolemy, and which still flourish in Sicily though all the parent plants have vanished out of Egypt.

They have looked down into the clear depths of La Pisma’s spring. Jane says it is less beautiful than the Silver Spring in Florida out which the Ocklawaha river rises, but that fountain of a tropical forest—transparent as air, and held in a great argent bowl—has no history, while La Pisma was the playmate of fair Persephone, and on seeing her ravished away by fiery Pluto melted quite away into a flood of bright tears. And it was she who, having caught up Persephone’s dropped veil, floated it to the feet of Demeter, and told her where to look for the lost daughter. La Pisma and Anapus her lover were, too, the real guardians of Syracuse, for as one after another of the armies of invading enemies camped on their oozy plain they sapped the invaders’ strength, and blighted their courage with fevers from the miasmatic breaths exhaled upon the foes as they slept.

Jane and Peripatetica have found another mystery. Syracuse, it appears, is full of mysteries. This last is known as the Castle of Euryalus, and they must take horse and drive to it, six miles from the hotel, though still within the walls of the original city, once twenty-two miles about; shrunk in these later days to less than three. This six miles of pilgrimage gives ample time to search the guide-books for information as to this thing they have come out for to see. But the guide-books palter, and shuffle and evade, as they are prone to do about anything really interesting. Euryalus, solid enough to their eyes and to their sense of touch, seems as illusive in history as the cloudy towers of the Fata Morgana—now you see it, and now you don’t. It seems to come from nowhere. No one can tell when or by whom it was built, but it always turns up in the history of Syracuse in moments of stress—much like those Christian patron-saints who used suddenly to descend in shining armour to turn the tide of battle. One hears of Dionysius strengthening it when news comes that the dread Himilcon is on his way from Carthage with two hundred triremes accompanied by rafts, galleys, and transports innumerable. Dionysius makes Euryalus the key of a surprise he prepares for the Carthagenians, for when the latter come sailing into the harbour—“A forest of black masts and dark sails, with transports filled with elephants trumpeting at the smell of land,” and from the West “comes trampling across the plain by the Helorian road and the banks of the Anapus, the Punic army 300,000 strong, with 3,000 horse led by Himilcon in person,”—there stands waiting for them one of the most amazing works ever wrought by the will of a single man.

Dionysius in twenty days has built a wall three miles long barring Himilcon’s ingress at the only weak point. Seventy thousand of the inhabitants of Syracuse had worked at this building. Forty thousand slaves had been in the Latomiæ cutting the blocks of easily hewn sandstone, which six thousand oxen carried to the wall, while other armies of men had been upon the slopes of Ætna ravaging the oak woods for huge beams. When Himilcon comes the wall is complete.

Then there are more appearings and disappearings through the years, and suddenly Euryalus fills the foreground again. Archimedes is helping Hieronymus to fortify it against Marcellus—is designing veiled sally ports, and oblique apertures from which his “scorpions” and other curious war engines may hurl stones, is placing there the burning glasses with which he will set the Roman galleys on fire by means of the sun’s heat. But though the Carthagenians were terrible the Roman is more terrible still, and in spite of Archimedes they get into Syracuse after a three years’ siege. While the furies of final capture are raging Archimedes sits calmly drawing figures upon the sand. A Roman soldier rushing by carelessly smears them with his foot. Archimedes is angry, and “uses language.” The soldier, angry in his turn—no doubt “language” in Greek sounded especially insulting—shortens his sword and stabs “the greatest man then living in the world.”

Marcellus sheds tears when he hears it, and buries the father of mathematics with splendid honours, marking the tombstone—as Archimedes had wished—with no name, with only a sphere and a cylinder. He spared Syracuse too; left her temples and splendours intact, and forbid the usual plundering and massacres. Marcellus was, it seems, in every way a very decent person, and Peripatetica grieved that those frigid Romans wouldn’t let him have a triumph when he went home, and Jane breathed a hope that he used more language to that murderous soldier....

Later comes Cicero to Syracuse, hunting evidence against Verres, who had, as pro-consul, robbed the city of all the treasures Marcellus had spared, and the great lawyer takes time from his examination of witnesses to look out Archimedes’ resting place. He finds it overgrown with thistles and brambles, but recognizes it by the sphere and cylinder, and sets it once more in order.