at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by great piers of massive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour and populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame. Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. The enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held many thousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the roadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I entered those small Norman windows, with the lovely pillars and the round arch. On the ancient church I have observed the ornamentation and mouldings of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over the fountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was originally a mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters I come on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the faces of the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, I see the ruins of time. These echoes are not all of far-off things. That lookout below was a station of English cannon, I am told; and the bluff over Giardini, beyond the torrent, takes its name from the French tents pitched there long ago. The old walls can be traced for five miles, but now the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as I go down to my room in the Casa Timeo, what was the past of this silent town, now so shrunken from its ancient limits; and who, I ask myself, Timeo?

IV

I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keep that I should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but I find there are paths innumerable. Leap the low walls where I will, I come on unsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. They ran down the hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, like the branching streams of a waterfall. Some are rudely paved, and hemmed by low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth, often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the most unexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye and foot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. The multiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, for here one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfection. Every few moments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on the Riviera or at Amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovely pictures. The 

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