The Italian morning presents a beautiful sight on deck to eyes weary and sore with night, as night passes on board steamers. We pass along a coast obviously of singular conformation, and to a geologist, we suppose, full of interest. We encounter a herd of classical dolphins out a-pleasuring. We ask about a pretty little town perched just above the sea, and called _Giocosa_. By its side lies _Tyndaris_--classical enough if we spell it right. The snow on Etna is as good as an inscription, and to be read at any distance; but what a deception! they tell us it is thirty miles off, and it seems to rise immediately from behind a ridge of hills close to the shore. The snow cone rises in the midst of other cones, which would appear equally high but for the difference of colour. _Patti_ is a picturesque little _borgo_, on the hillside, celebrated in Sicily for its manufacture of hardware. In the bay of _Melazzo_ are taken by far the largest supplies of thunny in the whole Mediterranean. From the embayed town so named you have the choice of a cross-road to Messina, (twenty-four miles;) but who would abridge distance and miss the celebrated straits towards which we are rapidly approaching, or lose one hour on land and miss the novelties of volcanic islands, and the first view of Scylla and Charybdis? It is but eight o'clock, but the awning has been stretched over our heads an hour ago. As to breakfast--the meal which is associated with that particular hour of the four-and-twenty to all well regulated _minds_ and _stomachs_--it consists here of thin _veneers_ of old mahogany-coloured thunny, varnished with oil, and relieved by an incongruous abomination of capers and olives. The cold fowls are infamous. The wine were a disgrace to the sorriest tapster between this and the Alps, and also fiery, like every thing else in this district. Drink it, and doubt not the old result--_de conviva Corybanta videbis_. (Oh, for muffins and dry toast!) Never mind, we shall soon be at Messina. And now we approach a point from which the lofty Calabrian coast opposite, and the flinty wall of the formidable Scylla, first present themselves, but still as distant objects. In another half hour we are just opposite the redoubtable rock; and here we turn abruptly at right angles to our hitherto course, and find ourselves _within_ the straits, from either side of which the English and the French so often tried the effect of cannon upon each other. It is now what it used to be--fishing ground. The Romans got their finest muræna from the whirlpools of _Charybdis_.[17] The shark (_cane di mare_) abounding here, would make bathing dangerous were the water smooth; but the rapid whirlpools through which our steam-boat dashes on disdainfully, would, at the same time, make it impossible to any thing but a fish. A passenger assured us he had once seen a man lost in the Vistula, who, from being a great swimmer, trusted imprudently to his strength, and was sucked down by a vortex of far less