I' T was with an appetite whetted by long waiting that I landed in Sicily on the last day of May. Anybody might enjoy travel in Sicily. Its scenery is magnificent. A mountainous country with a coast-line of rugged headlands, and here and there a river breaking through to the sea, opening up vistas into the interior and forming a fertile plain at its mouth; above all snow-capped and smoking Etna with its nearly 11,000 feet towering so high as to be seen from every part of the island except the valleys, form a combination attractive even to one who has left history and art out of his travelling outfit. The student of history, however, gets a keener enjoyment in this land where so much history ancient, mediæval, and modern -has been enacted. Not only was it the apple of discord between Rome and Carthage, but, to say nothing of Sikans, Elymi, and Sikels, because their movements are wrapped in the mist of a prehistoric past, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Franks, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Germans, French, and Spaniards successively shaped its destinies until Garibaldi at last brought it to rest in the bosom of the kingdom of Italy. But Sicily has an especial interest for the student of the history and art of ancient Greece. He who studies the coun try now known as Greece and neglects the greater Hellas in the west makes a great mistake. Akragas and Selinus have left more imposing ruins than Athens, Olympia, and Delphi; and Syracuse was the most populous and the most powerful of all Greek cities. It was this especial claim which drew me and my two companions, members of the American School at Athens, to Catania. We desired to become as familiar with western Hellas as we had already become with eastern Hellas. We came rather too late in the year; not that physical comfort is an element for great consideration in such a land; it is rather the psychological aspect which I have in mind. Theocritus has thrown such associations of spring over Sicily that the traveller feels that he ought to be there with "pulses thronged with the fulness of the spring," which can hardly be the case in the great heat of June. Perhaps our bicycles might seem to some out of time with Theocritus and Pindar, and we did not try to throw any glamour of poetry over them. But they were vastly convenient. We had sent forward our heavy luggage to Palermo, and they carried all that we needed for two weeks. While they were not a substitute for trains, they freed us from servile dependence on trains. Copyright, 1901, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved. his forge. Your real mechanic, from Jubal Cain down, is always the right man in the right place. A deft-handed New Hampshire mechanic once said to me, after putting some dislocated object to rights in less than five minutes, "I shall have to charge you ten cents for doing the job and fifteen cents for knowing how." struck me as a good expression of the claims of the guild. Asinarus, where the fugitive Athenian army a grander scale hard by, with Ætna for was brought to bay and slaughtered and captured. The five o'clock train was too early. Who likes to take a morning meal at half-past four with the fear of losing a train before his eyes? Discomfort if not dyspepsia hovers over him. The alternative of a later train involved giving up the day to this excursion, and we needed that day for something else. We took a comfortable meal, and, starting at six o'clock, at a quarter past eight were on the banks of the Asinarus, and by the aid of a train were back in Syracuse at ten o'clock, ready for a good day's work. Our beginning was inauspicious. A *This and the following illustrations are from photo graphs by Giacomo Brogi, Naples. It When we got off it was nearly eleven o'clock, and the flower of the day was gone; but we had vowed to see the sunrise from the theatre of Taormina the next morning; and so we sped off in the heat of all the hard things we had said of the over roads so bad as to make us repent |