When I awoke, the morning sun was rising like a globe of fire above the mountains, and pouring between their craggy summits a flood of yellow lustre into the misty valley where we lay. Afar off, the villa of Belcastro, its casements gleaming in the dancing sunbeams like plates of polished gold, towered on the cliff that rose above the waving woodlands bathed in purple and white. A solitary fig-tree threw its shadow across the fountain; the rude bason of which had been built by the shepherds with the richly sculptured fragments of some ancient building: a relic, perhaps, of the days of Magna Græcia. On the moss-grown pieces were initials and inscriptions which I had neither time nor lore to decipher; and close by me lay, half sunk in the flowery turf, a mossy Corinthian capital, with a winged horse, exquisitely carved, springing from the acanthus leaves at each corner, and supporting on its outspread pinions the acute angles of the abacus. A glittering snake was twining around it; and the contiguity of such a reptile recalling the adventure with the gypsies, I sprang up, shook my ample cloak, and prepared for the saddle again. A gallop in the pure air of a breezy morning is delightful exercise; it refreshes the body and enlivens the spirits, bracing the frame and lightening the heart. The place where we had reposed was swampy, and a pestilential vapour hovered about it, oppressing us with an inclination to doze, which we had some trouble in combating; but our gallop along the sunny mountain-side soon shook off the drowsiness which weighed down our eyelids, and the numbness that stiffened our limbs. The sensation I mean, must have been experienced by all who have bivouacked by night in low marshy places in a warm atmosphere. We passed the little town of Belcastro, the streets of which, according to ancient use and wont, were so encumbered with herds of wild pigs, the common stock of the inhabitants, that we could scarcely get our startled horses through, and were every moment in danger of being thrown by the snorting porkers running between their legs. We had a hasty repast at a miserable albergo; but it was the best in the place, and, as the host averred, the identical house in which Thomas Aquinas was born. The roads were so winding: and intricate that as yet we were only twenty miles distant from Crotona, and we pushed rapidly forward, resolving to make up for the previous day’s delay.