dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The run
that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon
branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the
mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on
the campagna in the meadows, and that further _fiume freddo_, the cold
stream,--"chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the
white snow, a draught divine,"--each of these seems inhabited by a
genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But all
alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.

On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls,
and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. No
idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of
the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go down to the
shore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the same
implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. Often as
I look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads
over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on
the sands.

"Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had
strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay
against the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their
toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the
sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots
woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props.
Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors'
caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had
never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemed
superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by