tell you was their king, when Sicily was under the Saracenic yoke.
The river _Lecatia_, now lost, is supposed formerly to have issued
hereabouts, in the port of Ulysses. Our next move placed us amidst
the silk-slops of Catania. We have hardly been five minutes in the
town, when offers abound to conduct us up Ætna, in whom, as so much
national wealth, the inhabitants seem to take as much interest as in
her useful and productive silk-looms. Standing fearless on the
pavement of lava that buried their ancient city, they point up with
complacency to its fountains above. The mischievous exploits of Ætna,
in past times, are in every mouth, and children learn their Ætnean
catechism as soon as they are breeched. Ætna here is all in all.
Churches are constructed out of his quarried _viscera_--great men lie
in tombs, of which the stones once ran liquid down his flames--snuff
is taken out of lava boxes--and devotion carves the crucifix on lava,
and numbers its beads on a lava rosary--nay, the apothecary's mortar
was sent him down from the great mortar-battery above, and the
village _belle_ wears fire-proof bracelets that were once too hot to
be meddled with. Go to the museum, and you will call it a museum of
Ætnean products. Nodulated, porous, condensed, streaked, spotted,
clouded, granulated lava, here assumes the colour, rivals the
compactness, sustains the polish, of jasper, of agate, and of marble;
indeed it sometimes surpasses, in beautiful veinage, the finest and
rarest Marmorean specimens. You would hardly distinguish some of it,
worked into jazza or vase, from _rosso antico_ itself. A very old and
rusty armoury may, as here, be seen any where; but a row of
formidable shark skulls, taken along the coast, and some in the very
port of Catania, are rarities on which the _ciceroni_ like to
prelect, being furnished with many a story of bathers curtailed by
them, and secure a large portion of attention, especially if you were
just thinking of a dip. A rather fine collection of bronzes has been