Greeks, who founded their Abystron on this particular site for the same
reasons that commended it in yet earlier times to certain bronze and
stone age primitives, whose weapons you may study in the British Museum
and elsewhere. [Footnote: Even so Taranto, Cumae, Paestum, Metapontum,
Monteleone and other southern towns were founded by the ancients on the
site of prehistoric stations.]

But what are the stone ages compared with immortal and immutable
Rossano? An ecclesiastical writer has proved that Calabria was inhabited
before the Noachian flood; and Rossano, we may be sure, was one of the
favourite haunts of the antediluvians. None the less, it is good to rest
in a clean bed, for a change; and to feed off a clean plate.

We are in the south. One sees it in sundry small ways--in the behaviour
of the cats, for instance. . . .

The Tarentines, they say, imported the cat into Europe. If those of
south Italy still resemble their old Nubian ancestors, the beast would
assuredly not have been worth the trouble of acclimatizing. On entering
these regions, one of the first things that strikes me is the difference
between the appearance of cats and dogs hereabouts, and in England or
any northern country; and the difference in their temperaments. Our dogs
are alert in their movements and of wideawake features; here they are
arowsy and degraded mongrels, with expressionless eyes. Our cats are
sleek and slumberous; here they prowl about haggard, shifty and
careworn, their fur in patches and their ears a-tremble from nervous
anxiety. That domestic animals such as these should be fed at home does
not commend itself to the common people; they must forage for their food
abroad. Dogs eat offal, while the others hunt for lizards in the fields.
A lizard diet is supposed to reduce their weight (it would certainly