After three hours' steaming from Catania, we were in the harbour of Syracuse; but it was at two in the morning, and we could not go ashore. A little scuttling takes place overhead while the Mongibello litters her two hundred and forty horses for the night; and, when this is accomplished, all is silent, and we sleep in the moonlit mirror. In two hours more the last star had dropped out of its place; and in another, rosy morn found us all in activity, and on deck, examining a most unprepossessing _paysage_, and contemplating, for many a league, the wretched coast road which must have been our doom if we had _not_ come by sea--so, for once, we had chosen well! Our alternative would have consisted in two days' swinging in a _lettiga_, in facing malaria in the fields, with nothing but famine and fever-stricken hamlets to halt at, and even these at long intervals. There were, to be sure, places enough of ancient _name_, in D'Anville's Geography, along the coast, but nothing _beyond_ the name itself. This is so exactly the case, that even with the beautiful and authentic money of _Leontium_ before us, we did not land at _Lentini_! There is nothing so utterly confounding as the contemplation of _money_, every piece of which is a _gem_, on spots where no imagination can conceive the city that coined it. We are not long before we begin to cater for new disappointment, in the desire to be conducted without delay to the fountain of _Arethusa_. Accordingly, a quarter of a mile's distance from our locanda, under the rampart of the old _Ortygia_, and in the most uncleanly suburb of modern Syracuse, the far-famed spring is pointed out to our incredulity; and we are at once booked with the many who, having got up a suitable provision of enthusiasm to be exploded on the spot, are obliged to carry it away with them. A vile, _soapy washing-tank_ is Arethusa, occupied by half-naked, noisy laundresses, thumping away with wooden bats at brown-looking linen, or depositing the wet load that had been belaboured and rinsed on the bank, gabbling, as they work, like the very _Adonizousoe_ of Theocritus, (himself, as he informs us, a native of Syracuse.) A man lay sleeping with his dog beside him; a number of mahogany-coloured children, quite naked, were sprawling on the parapet-wall, covered with flies, but fast asleep! A poor bird, a descendant of the [Greek: Adones Sikelikai], a nightingale of the soil, _with his eyes put out, that he might not know day from night, and so sing unconsciously, sang to us as we passed_! But the affair was destined, in a single moment, to become ludicrous as well as disappointing. Our guide, Jack Robertson, (so named by an English man-of-war's crew that had, as he said, kidnapped him during the war,) quite mistaking the _nature_ of our disappointment, said, consolingly, "You come _dis_ way, sir; down here I show you _more gals' feet, wash more clothes_;" on which intimation we certainly