It was evening before we were again in our saddles and _en route_. We hired a goat-herd to conduct us by a short, though unfrequented, road to Francavilla; but it proved a long journey to us: the rogue led us the wrong way, and absconded about nightfall, leaving us among the mountain forests near Squillaci, on the Adriatic side of this land of brawl and uproar. *CHAPTER VII.* *ADVENTURE AT THE CENTAUR.* By the way-side we met a poor and aged priest, travelling on foot; he was exhausted with toil, and his gray hair and tattered cope were covered with the dust of a long journey; he had sandals on his feet, a wallet on his back, and a long staff in his hand. I could not ride past him: I, who was young, stout, and active; so dismounting, I marched on foot for six miles, while the thankful canon rode my caparisoned grey to Squillaci. He was a Greek priest, travelling from Rossano, where there were several monasteries of the order of St. Basil; all afterwards suppressed by Murat. My kindness was repaid by his superior, the old Abate of the Basilians; to whom he reported our arrival in the decayed and solitary town, which was then involved in the gloom and obscurity of night. We heard no sound as we entered, save that of our horse’s hoofs ringing on the old Roman road, and the distant roar of the Ionian sea, as it rolled on the reverberating shores of the gulf—the Scylletic gulf of classical antiquity, famous for the shipwreck of "wise Ulysses;" who, as tradition asserts, with the survivors of his disaster, founded the city. We were hospitably received by the Abate, who was a true Calabrian and staunch royalist; and he made the purple wines of the province flow like water, in honour of Ferdinand and Carolina of Naples—"il Cavaliere Stuardo, and the brave soldiers of his Britannic Majesty—Evoe, viva!" As we had ridden our horses at an easy pace, they held out admirably; but seventy miles of such miserable roads as those we had travelled—ways suited only for mules, goats, and buffaloes—were equal to a hundred on level ground. By the war-like operations of the French, the Masse, and the brigands, the rustic bridges were everywhere broken down, and the roads trenched and cut up to hinder the passage of cannon and waggons; so we had to make many a weary detour among the hills, following sheep-tracks, at one time at the summit, at another at the bottom of a precipice: too often we had no better road than the dry channel of a mountain stream afforded; and on such a path it required the utmost powers of spur and bridle, and all the rider’s skill, to prevent the horse breaking his knees by slipping on the wave-worn pebbles. On quitting the monastery next morning, we beheld the ceremony of a military salutation of the consecrated host, by a party of the Sicilian volunteers belonging to Kempt’s brigade, then lying there in cantonment.